Securing SDN controlled IoT Networks Through Edge-Blockchain

The Internet of Things (IoT) connected by Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises to bring great benefits to cyber-physical systems. However, the increased attack surface offered by the growing number of connected vulnerable devices and separation of SDN control and data planes could overturn the huge benefits of such a system. This paper addresses the vulnerability of the trust relationship between the control and data planes. To meet this aim, we propose an edge computing based blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS), enabled by an external BaaS provider. The proposed solution provides verification of inserted flows through an efficient, edge-distributed, blockchain solution. We study two scenarios for the blockchain reward purpose: (a) information symmetry, in which the SDN operator has direct knowledge of the real effort spent by the BaaS provider; and (b) information asymmetry, in which the BaaS provider controls the exposure of information regarding spent effort. The latter yields the so called “moral hazard”, where the BaaS may claim higher than actual effort. We develop a novel mathematical model of the edge BaaS solution; and propose an innovative algorithm of a fair reward scheme based on game theory that takes into account moral hazard. We evaluate the viability of our solution through analytical simulations. The results demonstrate the ability of the proposed algorithm to maximize the joint profits of the BaaS and the SDN operator, i.e. maximizing the social welfare

Gain More for Less: The Surprising Benefits of QoS Management in Constrained NDN Networks

Quality of Service (QoS) in the IP world mainly manages forwarding resources, i.e., link capacities and buffer spaces. In addition, Information Centric Networking (ICN) offers resource dimensions such as in-network caches and forwarding state. In constrained wireless networks, these resources are scarce with a potentially high impact due to lossy radio transmission. In this paper, we explore the two basic service qualities (i) prompt and (ii) reliable traffic forwarding for the case of NDN. The resources we take into account are forwarding and queuing priorities, as well as the utilization of caches and of forwarding state space. We treat QoS resources not only in isolation, but correlate their use on local nodes and between network members. Network-wide coordination is based on simple, predefined QoS code points. Our findings indicate that coordinated QoS management in ICN is more than the sum of its parts and exceeds the impact QoS can have in the IP world

Information resilience: Source recovery in an information-centric network

Recent years have witnessed explosive growth in traffic demands combined with evolving content characteristics and dissemination patterns. This growth has resulted in an increasing demand for information identification as well as information-based communication functions that can meet this evolution. Consequently, information-centric networking envisions a shift in the future Internet communication paradigm from relying on the notion of an end node toward making information itself the primary object. This is realized by adopting information as the primary identifier of a user's demand. With this new concept in networking, new (information- focused) solutions can be developed to conventional problems found in IP networks, such as resilient content delivery. In this article we introduce a novel resiliency solution that goes beyond the scope of path recovery to tackle source failure scenarios in order to achieve the more general form of information resilience. We show that by utilizing the knowledge of information, offered by a publish/subscribe information-centric networking model, multiple publishers of a single information item can be natively identified, thereby allowing for recovery of the delivery process using alternative publishers should a publisher fail. © 1986-2012 IEEE

Quality of service in an information-centric network

QoS provisioning is one of the key challenges facing current as well as future Internet architectures. Its dependency on content recognition does not allow a straightforward support of QoS in the IP, host-centric, model. In contrast, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) offers native content identification in the network, which can be exploited to develop a common, elegant, framework for supporting QoS-based delivery. Therefore, ICN may naturally overcome many of the cumbersome fixes and limitations of today's solutions. In this work, we exploit the flexibility in semantic representation offered by ICN to present a flexible and scalable ICN-based QoS model. Our model defines QoS requirements as information items that can be linked to the content at various aggregation levels, independent of the communication approach. Therefore, it can be applied uniformly to various network types and hierarchies. Furthermore, our model offers enhanced traffic treatment as well as resource utilization while significantly reducing the overhead on the network

A cache-aware routing scheme for information-centric networks

In recent years, the information-centric networking (ICN) concept has been attracting increasing attention of the research community. The aim is to overcome intrinsic inefficiencies of the existing host-to-host communication paradigm, as well as to provide new and enhanced services to mobile and fixed users. A key feature of ICN is the support for in-network content caching. In this paper, we present a new cache-aware routing scheme for ICN. Our scheme takes into account the information about the locations of caches in the network and constructs delivery paths for efficient content dissemination. The proposed approach does not impose additional signaling overhead in the network; while at the same time it is agnostic of the cached contents. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified by simulation studies, which show an up to 50% delay reduction compared to traditional routing approaches