ANCHOR: logically-centralized security for Software-Defined Networks

While the centralization of SDN brought advantages such as a faster pace of innovation, it also disrupted some of the natural defenses of traditional architectures against different threats. The literature on SDN has mostly been concerned with the functional side, despite some specific works concerning non-functional properties like 'security' or 'dependability'. Though addressing the latter in an ad-hoc, piecemeal way, may work, it will most likely lead to efficiency and effectiveness problems. We claim that the enforcement of non-functional properties as a pillar of SDN robustness calls for a systemic approach. As a general concept, we propose ANCHOR, a subsystem architecture that promotes the logical centralization of non-functional properties. To show the effectiveness of the concept, we focus on 'security' in this paper: we identify the current security gaps in SDNs and we populate the architecture middleware with the appropriate security mechanisms, in a global and consistent manner. Essential security mechanisms provided by anchor include reliable entropy and resilient pseudo-random generators, and protocols for secure registration and association of SDN devices. We claim and justify in the paper that centralizing such mechanisms is key for their effectiveness, by allowing us to: define and enforce global policies for those properties; reduce the complexity of controllers and forwarding devices; ensure higher levels of robustness for critical services; foster interoperability of the non-functional property enforcement mechanisms; and promote the security and resilience of the architecture itself. We discuss design and implementation aspects, and we prove and evaluate our algorithms and mechanisms, including the formalisation of the main protocols and the verification of their core security properties using the Tamarin prover.Comment: 42 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, 5 algorithms, 139 reference

The KISS principle in Software-Defined Networking: a framework for secure communications

Security is an increasingly fundamental requirement in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). However, the pace of adoption of secure mechanisms has been slow, which we estimate to be a consequence of the performance overhead of traditional solutions and of the complexity of their support infrastructure. To address these challenges we propose KISS, a secure SDN control plane communications architecture that includes innovative solutions in the context of key distribution and secure channel support. Core to our contribution is the integrated device verification value (iDVV), a deterministic but indistinguishablefrom-random secret code generation protocol that allows local but synchronized generation/verification of keys at both ends of the control channel, even on a per-message basis. We show that our solution, while offering the same security properties, outperforms reference alternatives, with performance improvements up to 30% over OpenSSL, and improvement in robustness based on a code footprint one order of magnitude smaller

Architectures for virtualization and performance evaluation in software defined networks

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Computer Aided Verification

The open access two-volume set LNCS 12224 and 12225 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 32st International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2020, held in Los Angeles, CA, USA, in July 2020.* The 43 full papers presented together with 18 tool papers and 4 case studies, were carefully reviewed and selected from 240 submissions. The papers were organized in the following topical sections: Part I: AI verification; blockchain and Security; Concurrency; hardware verification and decision procedures; and hybrid and dynamic systems. Part II: model checking; software verification; stochastic systems; and synthesis. *The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Telecommunication Systems

This book is based on both industrial and academic research efforts in which a number of recent advancements and rare insights into telecommunication systems are well presented. The volume is organized into four parts: "Telecommunication Protocol, Optimization, and Security Frameworks", "Next-Generation Optical Access Technologies", "Convergence of Wireless-Optical Networks" and "Advanced Relay and Antenna Systems for Smart Networks." Chapters within these parts are self-contained and cross-referenced to facilitate further study

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2022, which was held during April 2-7, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 46 full papers and 4 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 159 submissions. The proceedings also contain 16 tool papers of the affiliated competition SV-Comp and 1 paper consisting of the competition report. TACAS is a forum for researchers, developers, and users interested in rigorously based tools and algorithms for the construction and analysis of systems. The conference aims to bridge the gaps between different communities with this common interest and to support them in their quest to improve the utility, reliability, exibility, and efficiency of tools and algorithms for building computer-controlled systems

Performance Optimization and Dynamics Control for Large-scale Data Transfer in Wide-area Networks

Transport control plays an important role in the performance of large-scale scientific and media streaming applications involving transfer of large data sets, media streaming, online computational steering, interactive visualization, and remote instrument control. In general, these applications have two distinctive classes of transport requirements: large-scale scientific applications require high bandwidths to move bulk data across wide-area networks, while media streaming applications require stable bandwidths to ensure smooth media playback. Unfortunately, the widely deployed Transmission Control Protocol is inadequate for such tasks due to its performance limitations. The purpose of this dissertation is to conduct rigorous analytical study of the design and performance of transport solutions, and develop an integrated transport solution in a systematical way to overcome the limitations of current transport methods. One of the primary challenges is to explore and compose a set of feasible route options with multiple constraints. Another challenge essentially arises from the randomness inherent in wide-area networks, particularly the Internet. This randomness must be explicitly accounted for to achieve both goodput maximization and stabilization over the constructed routes by suitably adjusting the source rate in response to both network and host dynamics.The superior and robust performance of the proposed transport solution is extensively evaluated in a simulated environment and further verified through real-life implementations and deployments over both Internet and dedicated connections under disparate network conditions in comparison with existing transport methods