Biblio

Enterprise networks are increasingly moving towards Software Defined Networking, which is becoming a major trend in the networking arena. With the increased popularity of SDN, there is a greater need for security measures for protecting the enterprise networks. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of an integrated security architecture for SDN based enterprise networks. The integrated security architecture uses a policy-based approach to coordinate different security mechanisms to detect and counteract a range of security attacks in the SDN. A distinguishing characteristic of the proposed architecture is its ability to deal with dynamic changes in the security attacks as well as changes in trust associated with the network devices in the infrastructure. The adaptability of the proposed architecture to dynamic changes is achieved by having feedback between the various security components/mechanisms in the architecture and managing them using a dynamic policy framework. The paper describes the prototype implementation of the proposed architecture and presents security and performance analysis for different attack scenarios. We believe that the proposed integrated security architecture provides a significant step towards achieving a secure SDN for enterprises.

Network protocols such as Ethernet and TCP/IP were not designed to ensure the security and privacy of users. To protect users' privacy, anonymity networks such as Tor have been proposed to hide both identities and communication contents for Internet traffic. However, such solutions cannot protect enterprise network traffic that does not transit the Internet. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a moving target technique called Packet Header Randomization (PHEAR), a privacy-enhancing system for enterprise networks that leverages emerging Software-Defined Networking hardware and protocols to eliminate identifiers found at the MAC, Network, and higher layers of the network stack. PHEAR also encrypts all packet data beyond the Network layer. We evaluate the security of PHEAR against a variety of known and novel attacks and conduct whole-network experiments that show the prototype deployment provides sufficient performance for common applications such as web browsing and file sharing.

In today's enterprise networks, there are many ways for a determined attacker to obtain a foothold, bypass current protection technologies, and attack the intended target. Over several years we have developed the Self-shielding Dynamic Network Architecture (SDNA) technology, which prevents an attacker from targeting, entering, or spreading through an enterprise network by adding dynamics that present a changing view of the network over space and time. SDNA was developed with the support of government sponsored research and development and corporate internal resources. The SDNA technology was purchased by Cryptonite, LLC in 2015 and has been developed into a robust product offering called Cryptonite NXT. In this paper, we describe the journey and lessons learned along the course of feasibility demonstration, technology development, security testing, productization, and deployment in a production network.