Biblio

Internet architecture has transformed into a more complex form than it was about a decade back. Today the internet comprises multimedia information where services and web applications have started to shift their focus on content. In our perspective of communication systems, content-centric networking (CCN) proposes a new methodology. The use of cache memory at the network level is an important feature of this new architecture. This cache is intended to store transit details for a set period, and it is hoped that this capability will aid in network quality, especially in a rapidly increasing video streaming situation. Information-centric networking (ICN) is the one architecture that is seen as a possible alternative for shifting the Internet from a host-centric to a content-centric point-of-view. It focuses on data rather than content. CCN is more reliable when it comes to data delivery as it does not need to depend on location for data. CCN architecture is scalable, secure and provides mobility support. In this paper, we implement a ccnchat, a chat testing application, which is created with the help of libraries provided by Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on local area network (LAN) between two users and demonstrate the working of this local chat application over CCN network that works alongside existing IP infrastructure.

Since its inception, the Internet has experienced tremendous speed and functionality improvements. Among these developments are innovative approaches such as the design and deployment of Internet Protocol version six (IPv6) and the continuous modification of TCP. New transport protocols like Stream Communication Transport Protocol (SCTP) and Multipath TCP (MPTCP), which can use multiple data paths, have been developed to overcome the IP-coupled challenge in TCP. However, given the difficulties of packet modifiers over the Internet that prevent the deployment of newly proposed protocols, e.g., SCTP, a UDP innovative approach with QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) has been put forward as an alternative. QUIC reduces the connection establishment complexity in TCP and its variants, high security, stream multiplexing, and pluggable congestion control. Motivated by the gains and acceptability of MPTCP, Multipath QUIC has been developed to enable multipath transmission in QUIC. While several researchers have reviewed the progress of improvement and application of MPTCP, the review on MPQUIC improvement is limited. To breach the gap, this paper provides a brief survey on the practical application and progress of MPQUIC in data communication. We first review the fundamentals of multipath transport protocols. We then provide details on the design of QUIC and MPQUIC. Based on the articles reviewed, we looked at the various applications of MPQUIC, identifying the application domain, tools used, and evaluation parameters. Finally, we highlighted the open research issues and directions for further investigations.

Information leaks are a top concern to industry and government leaders. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly growing technology capable of sensing real-world events. IoT devices lack a common security standard and typically use lightweight security solutions, exposing the sensitive real-world data they gather. Covert channels are a practical method of exfiltrating data from these devices.This research presents a novel IoT covert timing channel (CTC) that encodes data within preexisting network information, namely ports or addresses. This method eliminates the need for inter-packet delays (IPD) to encode data. Seven different encoding methods are implemented between two IoT protocols, TCP/IP and ZigBee. The TCP/IP covert channel is created by mimicking a Ring smart doorbell and implemented using Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers to generate traffic. The ZigBee channel is built by copying a Philips Hue lighting system and executed on an isolated local area network (LAN). Variants of the CTC focus either on Stealth or Bandwidth. Stealth methods mimic legitimate traffic captures to make them difficult to detect while the Bandwidth methods forgo this approach for maximum throughput. Detection results are presented using shape-based and regularity-based detection tests.The Stealth results have a throughput of 4.61 bits per second (bps) for TCP/IP and 3.90 bps for ZigBee. They also evade shape and regularity-based detection tests. The Bandwidth methods average 81.7 Kbps for TCP/IP and 9.76 bps for ZigBee but are evident in detection tests. The results show that CTC using address or port encoding can have superior throughput or detectability compared to IPD-based CTCs.

Middlebox is primarily used in Software-Defined Network (SDN) to enhance operational performance, policy compliance, and security operations. Therefore, security of the middlebox itself is essential because incorrect use of the middlebox can cause severe cybersecurity problems for SDN. Existing attacks against middleboxes in SDN (for instance, middleboxbypass attack) use methods such as cloned tags from the previous packets to justify that the middlebox has processed the injected packet. Flowcloak as the latest solution to defeat such an attack creates a defence using a tag by computing the hash of certain parts of the packet header. However, the security mechanisms proposed to mitigate these attacks are compromise-able since all parts of the packet header can be imitated, leaving the middleboxes insecure. To demonstrate our claim, we introduce a novel attack against SDN middleboxes by hijacking TCP/IP headers. The attack uses crafted TCP/IP headers to receive the tags and signatures and successfully bypasses the middleboxes.

Flexibility and speed in the development of new industrial machines are essential factors for the success of capital goods industries. When assembling a printed circuit board (PCB), since all the components are surface mounted devices (SMD), the whole process is automatic. However, in many PCBs, it is necessary to place components that are not SMDs, called pin through hole components (PTH), having to be inserted manually, which leads to delays in the production line. This work proposes and validates a prototype work cell based on a collaborative robot and vision systems whose objective is to insert these components in a completely autonomous or semi-autonomous way. Different tests were made to validate this work cell, showing the correct implementation and the possibility of replacing the human worker on this PCB assembly task.

As a fundamental departure from the IP design which encodes source and destination addresses in each packet, Named Data Networking (NDN) directly uses application-defined data names for network layer communications. While bringing important data-centric benefits, the semantic richness of NDN names has also raised confidentiality and privacy concerns. In this paper, we first define the problem of name confidentiality, and then investigate the solution space through a comprehensive examination of all the proposed solutions up to date. Our work shows that the proposed solutions are simply different means to hide the actual data names via a layer of translation; they differ in where and how the translation takes place, which lead to different trade-offs in feasibility, efficiency, security, scalability, and different degrees of adherence to NDN's data-centric communications. Our investigation suggests the feasibility of a systematic design that can enable NDN to provide stronger name confidentiality and user privacy as compared to today's TCP/IP Internet.

Deploying a new network architecture in the Internet requires changing some, but not necessarily all elements between communicating applications. One way to achieve gradual deployment is a proxy or gateway which "translates" between the new architecture and TCP/IP. We present such a proxy, called "Performance Enhancing Proxy for Deploying Network Architectures (PEP-DNA)", which allows TCP/IP applications to benefit from advanced features of a new network architecture without having to be redeveloped. Our proxy is a kernel-based Linux implementation which can be installed wherever a translation needs to occur between a new architecture and TCP/IP domains. We discuss the proxy operation in detail and evaluate its efficiency and performance in a local testbed, demonstrating that it achieves high throughput with low additional latency overhead. In our experiments, we use the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as examples, but our proxy is modular and flexible, and hence enables realistic gradual deployment of any new "clean-slate" approaches.

Name Data Networking (NDN) is a clean-slate network redesign that uses content names for routing and addressing. Facing the fact that TCP/IP is deeply entrenched in the current Internet architecture, NDN has made slow progress in industrial promotion. Meanwhile, new architectures represented by SDN, P4, etc., provide a flexible and programmable approach to network research. As a result, a centralized NDN routing mechanism is needed in the scenario for network integration between NDN and TCP/IP. Combining the NLSR protocol and the P4 environment, we introduce an efficient NDN routing mechanism that offers extensible NDN routing services (e.g., resources-location management and routing calculation) which can be programmed in the control plane. More precisely, the proposed mechanism allows the programmable switches to transmit NLSR packets to the control plane with the extended data plane. The NDN routing services are provided by control plane application which framework bases on resource-location mapping to achieve part of the NLSR mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can reduce the number of routing packets significantly, and introduce a slight overhead in the controller compared with NLSR simulation.

Vehicular networks have been considered as a hopeful technology to enhance road safety, which is a crossing area of Internet of Things (IoT) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Current Internet architecture using the TCP/IP model and based on host-to-host is limited when it comes to vehicular communications which are characterized by high speed and dynamic topology. Thus, using Named Data Networking (NDN) in connected vehicles may tackle the issues faced with the TCP/IP model. In this paper, we investigate the security concerns of applying NDN in vehicular environments and discuss the remaining challenges in order to guide researchers in this field to choose their future research direction.

This paper integrates Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Information -Centric Networking (ICN) framework to enable low latency-based stateful routing and caching management by leveraging a novel forwarding and caching strategy. The framework is implemented in a clean- slate environment that does not rely on the TCP/IP principle. It utilizes Pending Interest Tables (PIT) instead of Forwarding Information Base (FIB) to perform data dissemination among peers in the proposed IC-SDN framework. As a result, all data exchanged and cached in the system are organized in chunks with the same interest resulting in reduced packet overhead costs. Additionally, we propose an efficient caching strategy that leverages in- network caching and naming of contents through an IC-SDN controller to support off- path caching. The testbed evaluation shows that the proposed IC-SDN implementation achieves an increased throughput and reduced latency compared to the traditional information-centric environment, especially in the high load scenarios.

Nowadays is becoming trivial to have multiple virtual machines working in parallel on hardware platforms with high processing power. This appropriate cost effective approach can be found at Internet Service Providers, in cloud service providers’ environments, in research and development lab testing environment (for example Universities’ student’s lab), in virtual application for security evaluation and in many other places. In the aforementioned cases, it is often necessary to start and/or stop virtual machines on the fly. In cloud service providers all the creation / tear down actions are triggered by a customer request and cannot be postponed or delayed for later evaluation. When a new virtual machine is created, it is imperative to assign unique IP addresses to all network interfaces and also domain name system DNS records that contain text based data, IP addresses, etc. Even worse, if a virtual machine has to be stopped or torn down, the critical network resources such as IP addresses and DNS records have to be carefully controlled in order to avoid IP addresses conflicts and name resolution problems between an old virtual machine and a newly created virtual machine. This paper proposes a provisioning mechanism to avoid both DNS records and IP addresses conflicts due to human misconfiguration, problems that can cause networking operation service disruptions.

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), it has been widely deployed. As many embedded devices are connected to the network and massive amounts of security-sensitive data are stored in these devices, embedded devices in IoT have become the target of attackers. The trusted computing is a key technology to guarantee the security and trustworthiness of devices' execution environment. This paper focuses on security problems on IoT devices, and proposes a security architecture for IoT devices based on the trusted computing technology. This paper implements a security management system for IoT devices, which can perform integrity measurement, real-time monitoring and security management for embedded applications, providing a safe and reliable execution environment and whitelist-based security protection for IoT devices. This paper also designs and implements an embedded security protection system based on trusted computing technology, containing a measurement and control component in the kernel and a remote graphical management interface for administrators. The kernel layer enforces the integrity measurement and control of the embedded application on the device. The graphical management interface communicates with the remote embedded device through the TCP/IP protocol, and provides a feature-rich and user-friendly interaction interface. It implements functions such as knowledge base scanning, whitelist management, log management, security policy management, and cryptographic algorithm performance testing.

Although OpenFlow-based SDN networks make it easier to design and test new protocols, when you think of clean slate architectures, their use is quite limited because the parameterization of its flows resides primarily in TCP/IP protocols. Besides, despite the many benefits that SDN offers, some aspects have not yet been adequately addressed, such as management plane activities, network startup, and options for connecting the data plane to the control plane. Based on these issues and limitations, this work presents a bootstrap protocol for SDN-based networks, which allows, beyond the network topology discovery, automatic configuration of an inband control plane. The protocol is designed to act only on layer two, in an autonomous, distributed and deterministic way, with low overhead and has the intent to be the basement for the implementation of other management plane related activities. A formal specification of the protocol is provided. In addition, an analytical model was created to preview the number of required messages to establish the control plane. According to this model, the proposed protocol presents less overhead than similar de-facto protocols used to topology discovery in SDN networks.

Tactical edge networks represent a uniquely challenging environment from the communications perspective, due to their limited bandwidth and high node mobility. Several middleware communication solutions have been proposed to address those issues, adopting an evolutionary design approach that requires facing quite a few complications to provide applications with a suited network programming model while building on top of the TCP/IP stack. Information Centric Networking (ICN), instead, represents a revolutionary, clean slate approach that aims at replacing the entire TCP/IP stack with a new communication paradigm, better suited to cope with fluctuating channel conditions and network disruptions. This paper, stemmed from research conducted within NATO IST-161 RTG, investigates the effectiveness of Named Data Networking (NDN), the de facto standard implementation of ICN, in the context of tactical edge networks and its potential for adoption. We evaluated an NDN-based Blue Force Tracking (BFT) dissemination application within the Anglova scenario emulation environment, and found that NDN obtained better-than-expected results in terms of delivery ratio and latency, at the expense of a relatively high bandwidth consumption.

In recent years the use of security gateways (SG) located within the electrical grid distribution network has become pervasive. SGs in substations and renewable distributed energy resource aggregators (DERAs) protect power distribution control devices from cyber and cyber-physical attacks. When encrypted communications within a DER network is used, TCP/IP packet inspection is restricted to packet header behavioral analysis which in most cases only allows the SG to perform anomaly detection of blocks of time-series data (event windows). Packet header anomaly detection calculates the probability of the presence of a threat within an event window, but fails in such cases where the unreadable encrypted payload contains the attack content. The SG system log (syslog) is a time-series record of behavioral patterns of network users and processes accessing and transferring data through the SG network interfaces. Threatening behavioral pattern in the syslog are measurable using both anomaly detection and graph theory. In this paper it will be shown that it is possible to efficiently detect the presence of and classify a potential threat within an SG syslog using light-weight anomaly detection and graph theory.

In this study, delays between data packets were read by using different window sizes to detect data transmitted from covert timing channel in computer networks, and feature vectors were extracted from them and detection of hidden data by some classification algorithms was achieved with high performance rate.

The Industrial Control System (ICS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are the backbones for monitoring and supervising factories, power grids, water distribution systems, nuclear plants, and other critical infrastructures. These systems are installed by third party contractors, maintained by site engineers, and operate for a long time. This makes tracing the documentation of the systems' changes and updates challenging since some of their components' information (type, manufacturer, model, etc.) may not be up-to-date, leading to possibly unaccounted security vulnerabilities in the systems. Device recognition is useful first step in vulnerability identification and defense augmentation, but due to the lack of full traceability in case of legacy ICS/SCADA systems, the typical device recognition based on document inspection is not applicable. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach involving the mix of communication-patterns and passive-fingerprinting to identify the unknown devices' types, manufacturers, and models. The algorithm uses the ICS/SCADA devices's communication-patterns to recognize the control hierarchy levels of the devices. In conjunction, certain distinguishable features in the communication-packets are used to recognize the device manufacturer, and model. We have implemented this hybrid approach in Python, and tested on traffic data from a water treatment SCADA testbed in Singapore (iTrust).

Interconnecting resource-constrained devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) is generally achieved via IP-based technologies such as 6LoWPAN, which rely on the adaptation of the TCP/IP stack to fit IoT requirements. Very recent researches suggest that the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm, which switches the way to do networking, by fetching data by names regardless of their location, would provide native support for the functionalities required by IoT applications. Indeed, ICN intrinsic features, such as caching, naming, packet level security and stateful forwarding, favor it as a promising approach in the IoT. This paper gives a qualitative comparative study between the two communication paradigms (TCP/IP and ICN), and discusses their support for IoT environments, with a focus on the required key features such as mobility, scalability, and security.

This computer era leads human to interact with computers and networks but there is no such solution to get rid of security problems. Securities threats misleads internet, we are sometimes losing our hope and reliability with many server based access. Even though many more crypto algorithms are coming for integrity and authentic data in computer access still there is a non reliable threat penetrates inconsistent vulnerabilities in networks. These vulnerable sites are taking control over the user's computer and doing harmful actions without user's privileges. Though Firewalls and protocols may support our browsers via setting certain rules, still our system couldn't support for data reliability and confidentiality. Since these problems are based on network access, lets we consider TCP/IP parameters as a dataset for analysis. By doing preprocess of TCP/IP packets we can build sovereign model on data set and clump cluster. Further the data set gets classified into regular traffic pattern and anonymous pattern using KNN classification algorithm. Based on obtained pattern for normal and threats data sets, security devices and system will set rules and guidelines to learn by it to take needed stroke. This paper analysis the computer to learn security actions from the given data sets which already exist in the previous happens.

The development of a robust strategy for network security is reliant upon a combination of in-house expertise and for completeness attack vectors used by attackers. A honeypot is one of the most popular mechanisms used to gather information about attacks and attackers. However, low-interaction honeypots only emulate an operating system and services, and are more prone to a fingerprinting attack, resulting in severe consequences such as revealing the identity of the honeypot and thus ending the usefulness of the honeypot forever, or worse, enabling it to be converted into a bot used to attack others. A number of tools and techniques are available both to fingerprint low-interaction honeypots and to defend against such fingerprinting; however, there is an absence of fingerprinting techniques to identify the characteristics and behaviours that indicate fingerprinting is occurring. Therefore, this paper proposes a fuzzy technique to correlate the attack actions and predict the probability that an attack is a fingerprinting attack on the honeypot. Initially, an experimental assessment of the fingerprinting attack on the low- interaction honeypot is performed, and a fingerprinting detection mechanism is proposed that includes the underlying principles of popular fingerprinting attack tools. This implementation is based on a popular and commercially available low-interaction honeypot for Windows - KFSensor. However, the proposed fuzzy technique is a general technique and can be used with any low-interaction honeypot to aid in the identification of the fingerprinting attack whilst it is occurring; thus protecting the honeypot from the fingerprinting attack and extending its life.

In the last years, networking scenarios have been evolving, hand-in-hand with new and varied applications with heterogeneous Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. These requirements must be efficiently and effectively delivered. Given its static layered structure and almost complete lack of built-in QoS support, the current TCP/IP-based Internet hinders such an evolution. In contrast, the clean-slate Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) proposes a new recursive and programmable networking model capable of evolving with the network requirements, solving in this way most, if not all, TCP/IP protocol stack limitations. Network providers can better deliver communication services across their networks by taking advantage of the RINA architecture and its support for QoS. This support allows providing complete information of the QoS needs of the supported traffic flows, and thus, fulfilment of these needs becomes possible. In this work, we focus on the importance of path selection to better ensure QoS guarantees in long-haul RINA networks. We propose and evaluate a programmable strategy for path selection based on flow QoS parameters, such as the maximum allowed latency and packet losses, comparing its performance against simple shortest-path, fastest-path and connection-oriented solutions.

Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) has the potential to greatly improve application performance by using multiple paths transparently. We propose a fluid model for a large class of MP-TCP algorithms and identify design criteria that guarantee the existence, uniqueness, and stability of system equilibrium. We clarify how algorithm parameters impact TCP-friendliness, responsiveness, and window oscillation and demonstrate an inevitable tradeoff among these properties. We discuss the implications of these properties on the behavior of existing algorithms and motivate our algorithm Balia (balanced linked adaptation), which generalizes existing algorithms and strikes a good balance among TCP-friendliness, responsiveness, and window oscillation. We have implemented Balia in the Linux kernel. We use our prototype to compare the new algorithm to existing MP-TCP algorithms.