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2023-05-19
Gombos, Gergő, Mouw, Maurice, Laki, Sándor, Papagianni, Chrysa, De Schepper, Koen.  2022.  Active Queue Management on the Tofino programmable switch: The (Dual)PI2 case. ICC 2022 - IEEE International Conference on Communications. :1685—1691.
The excess buffering of packets in network elements, also referred to as bufferbloat, results in high latency. Considering the requirements of traffic generated by video conferencing systems like Zoom, cloud rendered gaming platforms like Google Stadia, or even video streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube, timeliness of such traffic is important. Ensuring low latency to IP flows with a high throughput calls for the application of Active Queue Management (AQM) schemes. This introduces yet another problem as the co-existence of scalable and classic congestion controls leads to the starvation of classic TCP flows. Technologies such as Low Latency Low Loss Scalable Throughput (L4S) and the corresponding dual queue coupled AQM, DualPI2, provide a robust solution to these problems. However, their deployment on hardware targets such as programmable switches is quite challenging due to the complexity of algorithms and architectural constraints of switching ASICs. In this study, we provide proof of concept implementations of two AQMs that enable the co-existence of scalable and traditional TCP traffic, namely DualPI2 and the preceding single-queue PI2 AQM, on an Intel Tofino switching ASIC. Given the fixed operation of the switch’s traffic manager, we investigate to what extent it is possible to implement a fully RFC-compliant version of the two AQMs on the Tofino ASIC. The study shows that an appropriate split between control and data plane operations is required while we also exploit fixed functionality of the traffic manager to support such solutions.
2022-07-01
Yin, Jinyu, Jiang, Li, Zhang, Xinggong, Liu, Bin.  2021.  INTCP: Information-centric TCP for Satellite Network. 2021 4th International Conference on Hot Information-Centric Networking (HotICN). :86—91.
Satellite networks are booming to provide high-speed and low latency Internet access, but the transport layer becomes one of the main obstacles. Legacy end-to-end TCP is designed for terrestrial networks, not suitable for error-prone, propagation delay varying, and intermittent satellite links. It is necessary to make a clean-slate design for the satellite transport layer. This paper introduces a novel Information-centric Hop-by-Hop transport layer design, INTCP. It carries out hop-by-hop packets retransmission and hop-by-hop congestion control with the help of cache and request-response model. Hop-by-hop retransmission recovers lost packets on hop, reduces retransmission delay. INTCP controls traffic and congestion also by hop. Each hop tries its best to maximize its bandwidth utilization and improves end-to-end throughput. The capability of caching enables asynchronous multicast in transport layer. This would save precious spectrum resources in the satellite network. The performance of INTCP is evaluated with the simulated Starlink constellation. Long-distance communication with more than 1000km is carried out. The results demonstrate that, for the unicast scenario INTCP could reduce 42% one-way delay, 53% delay jitters, and improve 60% throughput compared with the legacy TCP. In multicast scenario, INTCP could achieve more than 6X throughput.
2022-04-19
Klein, Amit.  2021.  Cross Layer Attacks and How to Use Them (for DNS Cache Poisoning, Device Tracking and More). 2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). :1179–1196.
We analyze the prandom pseudo random number generator (PRNG) in use in the Linux kernel (which is the kernel of the Linux operating system, as well as of Android) and demonstrate that this PRNG is weak. The prandom PRNG is in use by many "consumers" in the Linux kernel. We focused on three consumers at the network level – the UDP source port generation algorithm, the IPv6 flow label generation algorithm and the IPv4 ID generation algorithm. The flawed prandom PRNG is shared by all these consumers, which enables us to mount "cross layer attacks" against the Linux kernel. In these attacks, we infer the internal state of the prandom PRNG from one OSI layer, and use it to either predict the values of the PRNG employed by the other OSI layer, or to correlate it to an internal state of the PRNG inferred from the other protocol.Using this approach we can mount a very efficient DNS cache poisoning attack against Linux. We collect TCP/IPv6 flow label values, or UDP source ports, or TCP/IPv4 IP ID values, reconstruct the internal PRNG state, then predict an outbound DNS query UDP source port, which speeds up the attack by a factor of x3000 to x6000. This attack works remotely, but can also be mounted locally, across Linux users and across containers, and (depending on the stub resolver) can poison the cache with an arbitrary DNS record. Additionally, we can identify and track Linux and Android devices – we collect TCP/IPv6 flow label values and/or UDP source port values and/or TCP/IPv4 ID fields, reconstruct the PRNG internal state and correlate this new state to previously extracted PRNG states to identify the same device.
2021-08-11
Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J.J., Ali Albalawi, Abdulazaz.  2020.  Connection-Free Reliable and Efficient Transport Services in the IP Internet. 2020 16th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM). :1—7.
The Internet Transport Protocol (ITP) is introduced to support reliable end-to-end transport services in the IP Internet without the need for end-to-end connections, changes to the Internet routing infrastructure, or modifications to name-resolution services. Results from simulation experiments show that ITP outperforms the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture, which requires replacing the Internet Protocol (IP). In addition, ITP allows transparent content caching while enforcing privacy.
2020-12-28
Sharma, V., Renu, Shree, T..  2020.  An adaptive approach for Detecting Blackhole using TCP Analysis in MANETs. 2nd International Conference on Data, Engineering and Applications (IDEA). :1—5.

From recent few years, need of information security is realized by society amd researchers specially in multi-path, unstructured networks as Mobile Ad-hoc Network. Devices connected in such network are self-configuring and small in size and can communicate in infra less environment. Architecture is very much dynamic and absence of central controlling authority puts challenges to the network by making more vulnerable for various threats and attacks in order to exploit the function of the network. The paper proposes, TCP analysis against very popular attack i.e. blackhole attack. Under different circumstance, reliable transport layer protocol TCP is analyzed for the effects of the attack on adhoc network. Performance has been measured using metrics of average throughput, normalized routing load and end to end delay and conclusions have been drawn based on that.

2020-07-16
Ayub, Md. Ahsan, Smith, Steven, Siraj, Ambareen.  2019.  A Protocol Independent Approach in Network Covert Channel Detection. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) and IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC). :165—170.

Network covert channels are used in various cyberattacks, including disclosure of sensitive information and enabling stealth tunnels for botnet commands. With time and technology, covert channels are becoming more prevalent, complex, and difficult to detect. The current methods for detection are protocol and pattern specific. This requires the investment of significant time and resources into application of various techniques to catch the different types of covert channels. This paper reviews several patterns of network storage covert channels, describes generation of network traffic dataset with covert channels, and proposes a generic, protocol-independent approach for the detection of network storage covert channels using a supervised machine learning technique. The implementation of the proposed generic detection model can lead to a reduction of necessary techniques to prevent covert channel communication in network traffic. The datasets we have generated for experimentation represent storage covert channels in the IP, TCP, and DNS protocols and are available upon request for future research in this area.

2019-08-26
Asati, V. K., Pilli, E. S., Vipparthi, S. K., Garg, S., Singhal, S., Pancholi, S..  2018.  RMDD: Cross Layer Attack in Internet of Things. 2018 International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI). :172-178.

The existing research on the Internet of Things(IoT) security mainly focuses on attack and defense on a single protocol layer. Increasing and ubiquitous use of loT also makes it vulnerable to many attacks. An attacker try to performs the intelligent, brutal and stealthy attack that can reduce the risk of being detected. In these kinds of attacks, the attackers not only restrict themselves to a single layer of protocol stack but they also try to decrease the network performance and throughput by a simultaneous and coordinated attack on different layers. A new class of attacks, termed as cross-layer attack became prominent due to lack of interaction between MAC, routing and upper layers. These attacks achieve the better effect with reduced cost. Research has been done on cross-layer attacks in other domains like Cognitive Radio Network(CRN), Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN) and ad-hoc networks. However, our proposed scheme of cross-layer attack in IoT is the first paper to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we have proposed Rank Manipulation and Drop Delay(RMDD) cross-layer attack in loT, we have investigated how small intensity attack on Routing protocol for low power lossy networks (RPL) degrades the overall application throughput. We have exploited the Rank system of the RPL protocol to implement the attacks. Rank is given to each node in the graph, and it shows its position in the network. If the rank could be manipulated in some manner, then the network topology can be modified. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed attacks degrade network performance very much in terms of the throughput, latency, and connectivity.

Shrishak, Kris, Shulman, Haya, Waidner, Michael.  2018.  Removing the Bottleneck for Practical 2PC. Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :2300-2302.

Secure Two Party Computation (2PC) has the potential to facilitate a wide range of real life applications where privacy of the computation and participants is critical. Nevertheless, this potential has not translated to widespread industry acceptance due to performance issues. Over the years a significant research effort has focused on optimising the performance of 2PC. The computation complexity has been continually improved and recently, following circuit optimisations and hardware support for cryptographic operations, evaluations of 2PC on a single host currently produce efficient results. Unfortunately, when evaluated on remote hosts, the performance remains prohibitive for practical purposes. The bottleneck is believed to be the bandwidth. In this work we explore the networking layer of 2PC implementations and show that the performance bottleneck is inherent in the usage of TCP sockets in implementations of 2PC schemes. Through experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that other transport protocols can significantly improve the performance of 2PC, making it suitable for practical applications.

2018-09-12
Domínguez, A., Carballo, P. P., Núñez, A..  2017.  Programmable SoC platform for deep packet inspection using enhanced Boyer-Moore algorithm. 2017 12th International Symposium on Reconfigurable Communication-centric Systems-on-Chip (ReCoSoC). :1–8.

This paper describes the work done to design a SoC platform for real-time on-line pattern search in TCP packets for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) applications. The platform is based on a Xilinx Zynq programmable SoC and includes an accelerator that implements a pattern search engine that extends the original Boyer-Moore algorithm with timing and logical rules, that produces a very complex set of rules. Also, the platform implements different modes of operation, including SIMD and MISD parallelism, which can be configured on-line. The platform is scalable depending of the analysis requirement up to 8 Gbps. High-Level synthesis and platform based design methodologies have been used to reduce the time to market of the completed system.

2018-06-20
Sundaresan, Srikanth, Allman, Mark, Dhamdhere, Amogh, Claffy, Kc.  2017.  TCP Congestion Signatures. Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference. :64–77.

We develop and validate Internet path measurement techniques to distinguish congestion experienced when a flow self-induces congestion in the path from when a flow is affected by an already congested path. One application of this technique is for speed tests, when the user is affected by congestion either in the last mile or in an interconnect link. This difference is important because in the latter case, the user is constrained by their service plan (i.e., what they are paying for), and in the former case, they are constrained by forces outside of their control. We exploit TCP congestion control dynamics to distinguish these cases for Internet paths that are predominantly TCP traffic. In TCP terms, we re-articulate the question: was a TCP flow bottlenecked by an already congested (possibly interconnect) link, or did it induce congestion in an otherwise idle (possibly a last-mile) link? TCP congestion control affects the round-trip time (RTT) of packets within the flow (i.e., the flow RTT): an endpoint sends packets at higher throughput, increasing the occupancy of the bottleneck buffer, thereby increasing the RTT of packets in the flow. We show that two simple, statistical metrics derived from the flow RTT during the slow start period—its coefficient of variation, and the normalized difference between the maximum and minimum RTT—can robustly identify which type of congestion the flow encounters. We use extensive controlled experiments to demonstrate that our technique works with up to 90% accuracy. We also evaluate our techniques using two unique real-world datasets of TCP throughput measurements using Measurement Lab data and the Ark platform. We find up to 99% accuracy in detecting self-induced congestion, and up to 85% accuracy in detecting external congestion. Our results can benefit regulators of interconnection markets, content providers trying to improve customer service, and users trying to understand whether poor performance is something they can fix by upgrading their service tier.

2018-02-21
Lu, Y., Chen, G., Luo, L., Tan, K., Xiong, Y., Wang, X., Chen, E..  2017.  One more queue is enough: Minimizing flow completion time with explicit priority notification. IEEE INFOCOM 2017 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. :1–9.

Ideally, minimizing the flow completion time (FCT) requires millions of priorities supported by the underlying network so that each flow has its unique priority. However, in production datacenters, the available switch priority queues for flow scheduling are very limited (merely 2 or 3). This practical constraint seriously degrades the performance of previous approaches. In this paper, we introduce Explicit Priority Notification (EPN), a novel scheduling mechanism which emulates fine-grained priorities (i.e., desired priorities or DP) using only two switch priority queues. EPN can support various flow scheduling disciplines with or without flow size information. We have implemented EPN on commodity switches and evaluated its performance with both testbed experiments and extensive simulations. Our results show that, with flow size information, EPN achieves comparable FCT as pFabric that requires clean-slate switch hardware. And EPN also outperforms TCP by up to 60.5% if it bins the traffic into two priority queues according to flow size. In information-agnostic setting, EPN outperforms PIAS with two priority queues by up to 37.7%. To the best of our knowledge, EPN is the first system that provides millions of priorities for flow scheduling with commodity switches.

2018-01-16
Mergendahl, Samuel, Sisodia, Devkishen, Li, Jun, Cam, Hasan.  2017.  Source-End DDoS Defense in IoT Environments. Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Internet of Things Security and Privacy. :63–64.

While the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes increasingly popular and pervasive in everyday objects, IoT devices often remain unprotected and can be exploited to launch large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. One could attempt to employ traditional DDoS defense solutions, but these solutions are hardly suitable in IoT environments since they seldom consider the resource constraints of IoT devices. This paper presents FR-WARD which defends against DDoS attacks launched from an IoT network. FR-WARD is an adaptation of the classic DDoS defense system D-WARD. While both solutions are situated near the attack sources and drop packets to throttle DDoS traffic, FR-WARD utilizes the fast retransmit mechanism in TCP congestion control to minimize resource penalties on benign IoT devices. Based on our analysis and simulation results, FR-WARD not only effectively throttles DDoS traffic but also minimizes retransmission overhead for benign IoT devices.

2017-11-20
Mallikarjunan, K. N., Muthupriya, K., Shalinie, S. M..  2016.  A survey of distributed denial of service attack. 2016 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Control (ISCO). :1–6.

Information security deals with a large number of subjects like spoofed message detection, audio processing, video surveillance and cyber-attack detections. However the biggest threat for the homeland security is cyber-attacks. Distributed Denial of Service attack is one among them. Interconnected systems such as database server, web server, cloud computing servers etc., are now under threads from network attackers. Denial of service is common attack in the internet which causes problem for both the user and the service providers. Distributed attack sources can be used to enlarge the attack in case of Distributed Denial of Service so that the effect of the attack will be high. Distributed Denial of Service attacks aims at exhausting the communication and computational power of the network by flooding the packets through the network and making malicious traffic in the network. In order to be an effective service the DDoS attack must be detected and mitigated quickly before the legitimate user access the attacker's target. The group of systems that is used to perform the DoS attack is known as the botnets. This paper introduces the overview of the state of art in DDoS attack detection strategies.

2017-07-24
Nguyen, Truc Anh N., Gangadhar, Siddharth, Sterbenz, James P. G..  2016.  Performance Evaluation of TCP Congestion Control Algorithms in Data Center Networks. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Future Internet Technologies. :21–28.

TCP congestion control has been known for its crucial role in stabilizing the Internet and preventing congestion collapses. However, with the rapid advancement in networking technologies, resulting in the emergence of challenging network environments such as data center networks (DCNs), the traditional TCP algorithm leads to several impairments. The shortcomings of TCP when deployed in DCNs have motivated the development of multiple new variants, including DCTCP, ICTCP, IA-TCP, and D2TCP, but all of these algorithms exhibit their advantages at the cost of a number of drawbacks in the Global Internet. Motivated by the belief that new innovations need to be established on top of a solid foundation with a thorough understanding of the existing, well-established algorithms, we have been working towards a comprehensive analysis of various conventional TCP algorithms in DCNs and other modern networks. This paper presents our first milestone towards the completion of our comparative study in which we present the results obtained by simulating multiple TCP variants: NewReno, Vegas, HighSpeed, Scalable, Westwood+, BIC, CUBIC, and YeAH using a fat tree architecture. Each protocol is evaluated in terms of queue length, number of dropped packets, average packet delay, and aggregate bandwidth as a percentage of the channel bandwidth.