Biblio
This paper explores the potential of enabling SDN security and monitoring services by piggybacking on SDN reactive routing. As a case study, we implement and evaluate a piggybacking based intrusion prevention system called SDN-Defense. Our study of university WiFi traffic traces reveals that up to 73% of malicious flows can be detected by inspecting just the first three packets of a flow, and 90% of malicious flows from the first four packets. Using such empirical insights, we propose to forward the first K packets of each new flow to an augmented SDN controller for security inspection, where K is a dynamically configurable parameter. We characterize the cost-benefit trade-offs of SDN-Defense using real wireless traces and discuss potential scalability issues. Finally, we discuss other applications which can be enhanced by using our proposed piggybacking approach.
There has been a tremendous increase in popularity and adoption of wearable fitness trackers. These fitness trackers predominantly use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for communicating and syncing the data with user's smartphone. This paper presents a measurement-driven study of possible privacy leakage from BLE communication between the fitness tracker and the smartphone. Using real BLE traffic traces collected in the wild and in controlled experiments, we show that majority of the fitness trackers use unchanged BLE address while advertising, making it feasible to track them. The BLE traffic of the fitness trackers is found to be correlated with the intensity of user's activity, making it possible for an eavesdropper to determine user's current activity (walking, sitting, idle or running) through BLE traffic analysis. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that the BLE traffic can represent user's gait which is known to be distinct from user to user. This makes it possible to identify a person (from a small group of users) based on the BLE traffic of her fitness tracker. As BLE-based wearable fitness trackers become widely adopted, our aim is to identify important privacy implications of their usage and discuss prevention strategies.