377 research outputs found

    Software-defined middlebox networking

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    [no abstract

    Packet filter performance monitor (anti-DDOS algorithm for hybrid topologies)

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    DDoS attacks are increasingly becoming a major problem. According to Arbor Networks, the largest DDoS attack reported by a respondent in 2015 was 500 Gbps. Hacker News stated that the largest DDoS attack as of March 2016 was over 600 Gbps, and the attack targeted the entire BBC website. With this increasing frequency and threat, and the average DDoS attack duration at about 16 hours, we know for certain that DDoS attacks will not be going away anytime soon. Commercial companies are not effectively providing mitigation techniques against these attacks, considering that major corporations face the same challenges. Current security appliances are not strong enough to handle the overwhelming traffic that accompanies current DDoS attacks. There is also a limited research on solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks. Therefore, there is a need for a means of mitigating DDoS attacks in order to minimize downtime. One possible solution is for organizations to implement their own architectures that are meant to mitigate DDoS attacks. In this dissertation, we present and implement an architecture that utilizes an activity monitor to change the states of firewalls based on their performance in a hybrid network. Both firewalls are connected inline. The monitor is mirrored to monitor the firewall states. The monitor reroutes traffic when one of the firewalls become overwhelmed due to a HTTP DDoS flooding attack. The monitor connects to the API of both firewalls. The communication between the rewalls and monitor is encrypted using AES, based on PyCrypto Python implementation. This dissertation is structured in three parts. The first found the weakness of the hardware firewall and determined its threshold based on spike and endurance tests. This was achieved by flooding the hardware firewall with HTTP packets until the firewall became overwhelmed and unresponsive. The second part implements the same test as the first, but targeted towards the virtual firewall. The same parameters, test factors, and determinants were used; however a different load tester was utilized. The final part was the implementation and design of the firewall performance monitor. The main goal of the dissertation is to minimize downtime when network firewalls are overwhelmed as a result of a DDoS attack

    Rethinking Software Network Data Planes in the Era of Microservices

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    L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

    On the placement of security-related Virtualised Network Functions over data center networks

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    Middleboxes are typically hardware-accelerated appliances such as firewalls, proxies, WAN optimizers, and NATs that play an important role in service provisioning over today's data centers. Reports show that the number of middleboxes is on par with the number of routers, and consequently represent a significant commitment from an operator's capital and operational expenditure budgets. Over the past few years, software middleboxes known as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) are replacing the hardware appliances to reduce cost, improve the flexibility of deployment, and allow for extending network functionality in short timescales. This dissertation aims at identifying the unique characteristics of security modules implementation as VNFs in virtualised environments. We focus on the placement of the security VNFs to minimise resource usage without violating the security imposed constraints as a challenge faced by operators today who want to increase the usable capacity of their infrastructures. The work presented here, focuses on the multi-tenant environment where customised security services are provided to tenants. The services are implemented as a software module deployed as a VNF collocated with network switches to reduce overhead. Furthermore, the thesis presents a formalisation for the resource-aware placement of security VNFs and provides a constraint programming solution along with examining heuristic, meta-heuristic and near-optimal/subset-sum solutions to solve larger size problems in reduced time. The results of this work identify the unique and vital constraints of the placement of security functions. They demonstrate that the granularity of the traffic required by the security functions imposes traffic constraints that increase the resource overhead of the deployment. The work identifies the north-south traffic in data centers as the traffic designed for processing for security functions rather than east-west traffic. It asserts that the non-sharing strategy of security modules will reduce the complexity in case of the multi-tenant environment. Furthermore, the work adopts on-path deployment of security VNF traffic strategy, which is shown to reduce resources overhead compared to previous approaches

    A Framework for eBPF-Based Network Functions in an Era of Microservices

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    By moving network functionality from dedicated hardware to software running on end-hosts, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) pledges the benefits of cloud computing to packet processing. While most of the NFV frameworks today rely on kernel-bypass approaches, no attention has been given to kernel packet processing, which has always proved hard to evolve and to program. In this article, we present Polycube, a software framework whose main goal is to bring the power of NFV to in-kernel packet processing applications, enabling a level of flexibility and customization that was unthinkable before. Polycube enables the creation of arbitrary and complex network function chains, where each function can include an efficient in-kernel data plane and a flexible user-space control plane with strong characteristics of isolation, persistence, and composability. Polycube network functions, called Cubes, can be dynamically generated and injected into the kernel networking stack, without requiring custom kernels or specific kernel modules, simplifying the debugging and introspection, which are two fundamental properties in recent cloud environments. We validate the framework by showing significant improvements over existing applications, and we prove the generality of the Polycube programming model through the implementation of complex use cases such as a network provider for Kubernetes
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