Biblio

Fog computing extends cloud resources to the edge of the network, thus enabling network providers to support real-time applications at low latencies. These applications further demand high security against malicious attacks that target distributed fog servers. One effective defense mechanism here against cyber attacks is the use of honeypots. The latter acts as a potential target for attackers by diverting malicious traffic away from the servers that are dedicated to legitimate users. However, one main limitation of honeypots is the lack of real traffic and network activities. Therefore, it is important to implement a solution that simulates the behavior of the real system to lure attackers without the risk of being exposed. Hence this paper proposes a practical approach to generate network traffic by introducing decoy virtual network functions (VNF) embedded on fog servers, which make the network traffic on honeypots resemble a legitimate, vulnerable fog system to attract cyber attackers. The use of virtualization allows for robust scalability and modification of network functions based on incoming attacks, without the need for dedicated hardware. Moreover, deep learning is leveraged here to build fingerprints for each real VNF, which is subsequently used to support its decoy counterpart against active probes. The proposed framework is evaluated based on CPU utilization, memory usage, disk input/output access, and network latency.

The Department of Homeland Security Cyber Security Division (CSD) chose Moving Target Defense as one of the fourteen primary Technical Topic Areas pertinent to securing federal networks and the larger Internet. Moving Target Defense over IPv6 (MT6D) employs an obscuration technique offering keyed access to hosts at a network level without altering existing network infrastructure. This is accomplished through cryptographic dynamic addressing, whereby a new network address is bound to an interface every few seconds in a coordinated manner. The goal of this research is to produce a Register Transfer Level (RTL) network security processor implementation to enable the production of an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) variant of MT6D processor for wide deployment. RTL development is challenging in that it must provide system level functions that are normally provided by the Operating System's kernel and supported libraries. This paper presents the architectural design of a hardware engine for MT6D (HE-MT6D) and is complete in simulation. Unique contributions are an inline stream-based network packet processor with a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) architecture, Network Time Protocol listener, and theoretical increased performance over previous software implementations.