16 research outputs found
A multifold approach to address the security issues of stateful forwarding mechanisms in Information-Centric Networks.
Today's Internet dominant usage trends motivate research on more content-oriented future network architectures. Among the emerging future Internet proposals, the promising Information-Centric Networking (ICN) research paradigm aims to redesign the Internet's core protocols to promote a shift in focus from hosts to contents. Among the ICN architectures, the Named-Data Networking (NDN) envisions users' named content requests to be forwarded and recorded by their names in routers along the path from one consumer to 1-or-many sources. The Pending Interest Table (PIT) is the NDN's data-plane component which temporarily records forwarded content requests in routers. On one hand, the PIT stateful mechanism enables properties like requests aggregation, multicast responses delivery and native hop-by-hop control flow. On the other hand, the PIT stateful forwarding behavior can be easily abused by malicious users to mount disruptive distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), named Interest Flooding Attacks (IFAs). In IFAs, loosely coordinated botnets flood the network with a large amount of hard to satisfy requests with the aim to overload both the network infrastructure and the content producers. Countermeasures against IFA have been proposed since the early attack discovery. However, a fair understanding of the defense mechanisms' real efficacy is missing since those have been tested under simplistic assumptions about the evaluation scenarios. Thus, overall, the IFA security threat still appears easy to launch but hard to mitigate.
This dissertation work shapes a better understanding of both the implications of IFAs and the possibilities of improving the state-of-the-art defense mechanisms against these attacks. The contributions of this work include the definition of a more complete and realistic attacker model for IFAs, the design of novel stealthy IFAs built upon the proposed attacker model, a re-assessment of the most-efficient state-of-the-art IFA countermeasures against the novel proposed attacks, the theorization and one concrete design of a novel class of IFA countermeasures to efficiently address the novel stealthy IFAs. Finally, this work also seminally proposes to leverage the latest programmable data-plane technologies to design and test alternative forwarding mechanisms for the NDN which could be less vulnerable to the IFA threat
Exploring Computing Continuum in IoT Systems: Sensing, Communicating and Processing at the Network Edge
As Internet of Things (IoT), originally comprising of only a few simple sensing devices, reaches 34 billion units by the end of 2020, they cannot be defined as merely monitoring sensors anymore.
IoT capabilities have been improved in recent years as relatively large internal computation and storage capacity are becoming a commodity.
In the early days of IoT, processing and storage were typically performed in cloud.
New IoT architectures are able to perform complex tasks directly on-device, thus enabling the concept of an extended computational continuum.
Real-time critical scenarios e.g. autonomous vehicles sensing, area surveying or disaster rescue and recovery require all the actors involved to be coordinated and collaborate without human interaction to a common goal, sharing data and resources, even in intermittent networks covered areas.
This poses new problems in distributed systems, resource management, device orchestration,as well as data processing.
This work proposes a new orchestration and communication framework, namely CContinuum, designed to manage resources in heterogeneous IoT architectures across multiple application scenarios. This work focuses on two key sustainability macroscenarios: (a) environmental sensing and awareness, and (b) electric mobility support.
In the first case a mechanism to measure air quality over a long period of time for different applications at global scale (3 continents 4 countries) is introduced. The system has been developed in-house from the sensor design to the mist-computing operations performed by the nodes.
In the second scenario, a technique to transmit large amounts of fine-time granularity battery data from a moving vehicle to a control center is proposed jointly with the ability of allocating tasks on demand within the computing continuum
Segurança e privacidade em terminologia de rede
Security and Privacy are now at the forefront of modern concerns, and drive
a significant part of the debate on digital society. One particular aspect that
holds significant bearing in these two topics is the naming of resources in the
network, because it directly impacts how networks work, but also affects how
security mechanisms are implemented and what are the privacy implications
of metadata disclosure. This issue is further exacerbated by interoperability
mechanisms that imply this information is increasingly available regardless of
the intended scope.
This work focuses on the implications of naming with regards to security and
privacy in namespaces used in network protocols. In particular on the imple-
mentation of solutions that provide additional security through naming policies
or increase privacy. To achieve this, different techniques are used to either
embed security information in existing namespaces or to minimise privacy ex-
posure. The former allows bootstraping secure transport protocols on top of
insecure discovery protocols, while the later introduces privacy policies as part
of name assignment and resolution.
The main vehicle for implementation of these solutions are general purpose
protocols and services, however there is a strong parallel with ongoing re-
search topics that leverage name resolution systems for interoperability such
as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Information Centric Networks (ICN), where
these approaches are also applicable.Segurança e Privacidade são dois topicos que marcam a agenda na discus-
sĂŁo sobre a sociedade digital. Um aspecto particularmente subtil nesta dis-
cussĂŁo Ă© a forma como atribuĂmos nomes a recursos na rede, uma escolha
com consequências práticas no funcionamento dos diferentes protocols de
rede, na forma como se implementam diferentes mecanismos de segurança
e na privacidade das várias partes envolvidas. Este problema torna-se ainda
mais significativo quando se considera que, para promover a interoperabili-
dade entre diferentes redes, mecanismos autónomos tornam esta informação
acessĂvel em contextos que vĂŁo para lá do que era pretendido.
Esta tese foca-se nas consequĂŞncias de diferentes polĂticas de atribuição de
nomes no contexto de diferentes protocols de rede, para efeitos de segurança
e privacidade. Com base no estudo deste problema, são propostas soluções
que, atravĂ©s de diferentes polĂticas de atribuição de nomes, permitem introdu-
zir mecanismos de segurança adicionais ou mitigar problemas de privacidade
em diferentes protocolos. Isto resulta na implementação de mecanismos de
segurança sobre protocolos de descoberta inseguros, assim como na intro-
dução de mecanismos de atribuiçao e resolução de nomes que se focam na
protecçao da privacidade.
O principal veĂculo para a implementação destas soluções Ă© atravĂ©s de ser-
viços e protocolos de rede de uso geral. No entanto, a aplicabilidade destas
soluções extende-se também a outros tópicos de investigação que recorrem
a mecanismos de resolução de nomes para implementar soluções de intero-
perabilidade, nomedamente a Internet das Coisas (IoT) e redes centradas na
informação (ICN).Programa Doutoral em Informátic
Risk Management for the Future
A large part of academic literature, business literature as well as practices in real life are resting on the assumption that uncertainty and risk does not exist. We all know that this is not true, yet, a whole variety of methods, tools and practices are not attuned to the fact that the future is uncertain and that risks are all around us. However, despite risk management entering the agenda some decades ago, it has introduced risks on its own as illustrated by the financial crisis. Here is a book that goes beyond risk management as it is today and tries to discuss what needs to be improved further. The book also offers some cases