Biblio

As the COVID-19 pandemic scattered businesses and their workforces into new scales of remote work, vital security concerns arose surrounding remote access. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) also plays a growing role in the ability of companies to support remote workforces. As more enterprises embrace concepts of zero trust in their network security posture, access control policy management problems become a more significant concern as it relates to BYOD security enforcement. This BYOD security policy must enable work from home, but enterprises have a vested interest in maintaining the security of their assets. Therefore, the BYOD security policy must strike a balance between access, security, and privacy, given the personal device use. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of enabling zero trust in BYOD use cases. We present a BYOD policy specification to enable the zero trust access control known as BYOZ. Accompanying this policy specification, we have designed a network architecture to support enterprise zero trust BYOD use cases through the novel incorporation of continuous authentication & authorization enforcement. We evaluate our architecture through a demo implementation of BYOZ and demonstrate how it can meet the needs of existing enterprise networks using BYOD.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) represents a major shift from ossified hardware-based networks to programmable software-based networks. It introduces significant granularity, visibility, and flexibility into networking, but at the same time brings new security challenges. Although the research community is making progress in addressing both the opportunities in SDN and the accompanying security challenges, very few educational materials have been designed to incorporate the latest research results and engage students in learning about SDN security. In this paper, we presents our newly designed SDN security education materials, which can be used to meet the ever-increasing demand for high quality cybersecurity professionals with expertise in SDN security. The designed security education materials incorporate the latest research results in SDN security and are integrated into CloudLab, an open cloud platform, for effective hands-on learning. Through a user study, we demonstrate that students have a better understanding of SDN security after participating in these well-designed CloudLab-based security labs, and they also acquired strong research interests in SDN security.

Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) are generally implemented on vendor proprietary appliances or middleboxes, which usually lack a general programming interface, and their versatility and flexibility are also very poor. Emerging Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology can virtualize IDSes and elastically scale them to deal with attack traffic variations. However, existing NFV solutions treat a virtualized IDS as a monolithic piece of software, which could lead to inflexibility and significant waste of resources. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to virtualize IDSes as microservices where the virtualized IDSes can be customized on demand, and the underlying microservices could be shared and scaled independently. We also conduct experiments, which demonstrate that virtualizing IDSes as microservices can gain greater flexibility and resource efficiency.

Recent findings have shown that network and system attacks in Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) have been caused by malicious network applications that misuse APIs in an SDN controller. Such attacks can both crash the controller and change the internal data structure in the controller, causing serious damage to the infrastructure of SDN-based networks. To address this critical security issue, we introduce a security framework called AEGIS to prevent controller APIs from being misused by malicious network applications. Through the run-time verification of API calls, AEGIS performs a fine-grained access control for important controller APIs that can be misused by malicious applications. The usage of API calls is verified in real time by sophisticated security access rules that are defined based on the relationships between applications and data in the SDN controller. We also present a prototypical implementation of AEGIS and demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency by performing six different controller attacks including new attacks we have recently discovered.

OpenFlow, as the prevailing technique for Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), introduces significant programmability, granularity, and flexibility for many network applications to effectively manage and process network flows. However, because OpenFlow attempts to keep the SDN data plane simple and efficient, it focuses solely on L2/L3 network transport and consequently lacks the fundamental ability of stateful forwarding for the data plane. Also, OpenFlow provides a very limited access to connection-level information in the SDN controller. In particular, for any network access management applications on SDNs that require comprehensive network state information, these inherent limitations of OpenFlow pose significant challenges in supporting network services. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative connection tracking framework called STATEMON that introduces a global state-awareness to provide better access control in SDNs. STATEMON is based on a lightweight extension of OpenFlow for programming the stateful SDN data plane, while keeping the underlying network devices as simple as possible. To demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of STATEMON, we implement and evaluate a stateful network firewall and port knocking applications for SDNs, using the APIs provided by STATEMON. Our evaluations show that STATEMON introduces minimal message exchanges for monitoring active connections in SDNs with manageable overhead (3.27% throughput degradation).