skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: DOCSDN: Dynamic and Optimal Configuration of Software-Defined Networks
Networks are designed with functionality, security, performance, and cost in mind. Tools exist to check or optimize individual properties of a network. These properties may conflict, so it is not always possible to run these tools in series to find a configuration that meets all requirements. This leads to network administrators manually searching for a configuration. This need not be the case. In this paper, we introduce a layered framework for optimizing network configuration for functional and security requirements. Our framework is able to output configurations that meet reachability, bandwidth, and risk requirements. Each layer of our framework optimizes over a single property. A lower layer can constrain the search problem of a higher layer allowing the framework to converge on a joint solution. Our approach has the most promise for software-defined networks which can easily reconfigure their logical configuration. Our approach is validated with experiments over the fat tree topology, which is commonly used in data center networks. Search terminates in between 1–5 min in experiments. Thus, our solution can propose new configurations for short term events such as defending against a focused network attack.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1849904
PAR ID:
10209269
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Information Security and Privacy. ACISP 2019
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Payment channel networks are a promising solution to the scalability challenge of blockchains and are designed for significantly increased transaction throughput compared to the layer one blockchain. Since payment channel networks are essentially decentralized peerto- peer networks, routing transactions is a fundamental challenge. Payment channel networks have some unique security and privacy requirements that make pathfinding challenging, for instance, network topology is not publicly known, and sender/receiver privacy should be preserved, in addition to providing atomicity guarantees for payments. In this paper, we present an efficient privacypreserving routing protocol, SPRITE, for payment channel networks that supports concurrent transactions. By finding paths offline and processing transactions online, SPRITE can process transactions in just two rounds, which is more efficient compared to prior work. We evaluate SPRITE’s performance using Lightning Network data and prove its security using the Universal Composability framework. In contrast to the current cutting-edge methods that achieve rapid transactions, our approach significantly reduces the message complexity of the system by 3 orders of magnitude while maintaining similar latencies. 
    more » « less
  2. In modern healthcare, smart medical devices are used to ensure better and informed patient care. Such devices have the capability to connect to and communicate with the hospital's network or a mobile application over wi-fi or Bluetooth, allowing doctors to remotely configure them, exchange data, or update the firmware. For example, Cardiovascular Implantable Electronic Devices (CIED), more commonly known as Pacemakers, are increasingly becoming smarter, connected to the cloud or healthcare information systems, and capable of being programmed remotely. Healthcare providers can upload new configurations to such devices to change the treatment. Such configurations are often exchanged, reused, and/or modified to match the patient's specific health scenario. Such capabilities, unfortunately, come at a price. Malicious entities can provide a faulty configuration to such devices, leading to the patient's death. Any update to the state or configuration of such devices must be thoroughly vetted before applying them to the device. In case of any adverse events, we must also be able to trace the lineage and propagation of the faulty configuration to determine the cause and liability issues. In a highly distributed environment such as today's hospitals, ensuring the integrity of configurations and security policies is difficult and often requires a complex setup. As configurations propagate, traditional access control and authentication of the healthcare provider applying the configuration is not enough to prevent installation of malicious configurations. In this paper, we argue that a provenance-based approach can provide an effective solution towards hardening the security of such medical devices. In this approach, devices would maintain a verifiable provenance chain that would allow assessing not just the current state, but also the past history of the configuration of the device. Also, any configuration update would be accompanied by its own secure provenance chain, allowing verification of the origin and lineage of the configuration. The ability to protect and verify the provenance of devices and configurations would lead to better patient care, prevent malfunction of the device due to malicious configurations, and allow after-the-fact investigation of device configuration issues. In this paper, we advocate the benefits of such an approach and sketch the requirements, implementation challenges, and deployment strategies for such a provenance-based system. 
    more » « less
  3. The open radio access network (O-RAN) is recognized for its modularity and adaptability, facilitating swift responses to emerging applications and technological advancements. However, this architecture's disaggregated nature, coupled with support from various vendors, introduces new security challenges. This paper proposes an innovative approach to bolster the security of future O-RAN deployments by leveraging RAN slicing principles. Central to this security enhancement is the concept of secure slicing. We introduce SliceX, an xApp designed to safeguard RAN resources while ensuring strict throughput and latency requirements are met for legitimate users. Leveraging the open artificial intelligence cellular re-search (OAIC) platform, we observed that the network latency averages around ten microseconds in a default configuration without SliceX. The latency escalates to over seven seconds in the presence of a malicious user equipment (UE) flooding the net-work with requests. SliceX intervenes, restoring network latency to normal levels, with a maximum latency of approximately 2.3 s. These and other numerical findings presented in this paper affirm the tangible advantages of SliceX in mitigating security threats and ensuring that 0- RAN deployments meet stringent performance requirements. Our research demonstrates the real-world effectiveness of secure slicing, making SliceX a valuable tool for military, government, and critical infrastructure opera-tors reliant on public wireless communication networks to fulfill their security, resiliency, and performance objectives. 
    more » « less
  4. Home networks lack the powerful security tools and trained personnel available in enterprise networks. This compli- cates efforts to address security risks in residential settings. While prior efforts explore outsourcing network traffic to cloud or cloudlet services, such an approach exposes that network traffic to a third party, which introduces privacy risks, particularly where traffic is decrypted (e.g., using Transport Layer Security Inspection (TLSI)). To enable security screening locally, home networks could introduce new physical hardware, but the capital and deployment costs may impede deployment. In this work, we explore a system to leverage existing available devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, already inside a home network to create a platform for traffic inspection. This software-based solution avoids new hardware deployment and allows decryption of traffic without risk of new third parties. Our investigation compares on-router inspection of traffic with an approach using that same router to direct traffic through smartphones in the local network. Our performance evaluation shows that smartphone middleboxes can substantially increase the throughput of communication from around 10 Mbps in the on-router case to around 90 Mbps when smartphones are used. This approach increases CPU usage at the router by around 15%, with a 20% CPU usage increase on a smartphone (with single core processing). The network packet latency increases by about 120 milliseconds. 
    more » « less
  5. Integrated circuits are often fabricated in untrusted facilities, making intellectual property privacy a concern. This prompted the development of logic locking, a security technique that corrupts the functionality of a design without a correct secret key. Prior work has shown that system-level phenomena can degrade the security of locking, highlighting the importance of configuring locking in a system. In this work, we propose a design space modeling framework to generate system-level models of the logic locking design space in arbitrary ICs by simulating a small, carefully-selected portion of the design space. These models are used to automatically identify near-optimal locking configurations in a system that achieve security goals with minimal power/area overhead. We evaluate our framework with two experiments. 1) We evaluate the quality of modeling-produced solutions by exhaustively simulating locking in a RISC-V ALU. The models produced by our algorithm had an average R^2 > 0.99 for all design objectives and identified a locking configuration within 96% of the globally optimal solution after simulating < 3.6% of the design space. 2) We compare our model-based locking to conventional module-level locking in a RISC-V processor. The locking configuration from our model-based approach required 29.5% less power on average than conventional approaches and was the only method to identify a solution meeting all design objectives. 
    more » « less