The security of residential networks can vary greatly. These networks are often administrated by end-users who may lack security expertise or the resources to adequately defend their networks. Insecure residential networks provide attackers with opportunities to infiltrate systems and create a platform for launching powerful attacks. To address these issues, we introduce a new approach that uses software-defined networking (SDN) to allow home users to outsource their security maintenance to a cloud-based service provider. Using this architecture, we show how a novel network-based two-factor authentication approach can be used to protect Internet of Things devices. Our approach works without requiring modifications to end-devices. We further show how security modules can enforce protocol messages to limit the attack surface in vulnerable devices. Our analysis shows that the system is effective and adds less than 50 milliseconds of delay to the start of a connection with less than 100 microseconds of delay for subsequent packets.
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Whole home proxies: Bringing enterprise-grade security to residential networks
While enterprise networks follow best practices and security measures, residential networks often lack these protections. Home networks have constrained resources and lack a dedicated IT staff that can secure and manage the network and systems. At the same time, homes must tackle the same challenges of securing heterogeneous devices when communicating to the Internet. In this work, we explore combining software-defined networking and proxies with commodity residential Internet routers. We evaluate a "whole home" proxy solution for the Skype video conferencing application to determine the viability of the approach in practice. We find that we are able to automatically detect when a device is about to use Skype and dynamically intercept all of the Skype communication and route it through a proxy while not disturbing unrelated network flows. Our approach works across multiple operating systems, form factors, and versions of Skype.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1422180
- PAR ID:
- 10055771
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE ICC Communication and Information Systems Security Symposium
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 6
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Residential networks pose a unique challenge for security since they are operated by end-users that may not have security expertise. Residential networks are also home to devices that may have lackluster security protections, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which may introduce vulnerabilities. In this work, we introduce TLSDeputy, a middlebox-based system to protect residential networks from connections to inauthentic TLS servers. By combining the approach with OpenFlow, a popular software-defined networking protocol, we show that we can effectively provide residential network-wide protections across diverse devices with minimal performance overheads.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2016.7511094
