Biblio

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.

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.

With the rapid growth of network bandwidth, increases in CPU cores on a single machine, and application API models demanding more short-lived connections, a scalable TCP stack is performance-critical. Although many clean-state designs have been proposed, production environments still call for a bottom-up parallel TCP stack design that is backward-compatible with existing applications. We present Fastsocket, a BSD Socket-compatible and scalable kernel socket design, which achieves table-level connection partition in TCP stack and guarantees connection locality for both passive and active connections. Fastsocket architecture is a ground up partition design, from NIC interrupts all the way up to applications, which naturally eliminates various lock contentions in the entire stack. Moreover, Fastsocket maintains the full functionality of the kernel TCP stack and BSD-socket-compatible API, and thus applications need no modifications. Our evaluations show that Fastsocket achieves a speedup of 20.4x on a 24-core machine under a workload of short-lived connections, outperforming the state-of-the-art Linux kernel TCP implementations. When scaling up to 24 CPU cores, Fastsocket increases the throughput of Nginx and HAProxy by 267% and 621% respectively compared with the base Linux kernel. We also demonstrate that Fastsocket can achieve scalability and preserve BSD socket API at the same time. Fastsocket is already deployed in the production environment of Sina WeiBo, serving 50 million daily active users and billions of requests per day.

With the growing number of proposed clean-slate redesigns of the Internet, the need for a medium that enables all stakeholders to participate in the realization, evaluation, and selection of these designs is increasing. We believe that the missing catalyst is a meta network architecture that welcomes most, if not all, clean-state designs on a level playing field, lowers deployment barriers, and leaves the final evaluation to the broader community. This paper presents Linux XIA, a native implementation of XIA in the Linux kernel, as a candidate. We first describe Linux XIA in terms of its architectural realizations and algorithmic contributions. We then demonstrate how to port several distinct and unrelated network architectures onto Linux XIA. Finally, we provide a hybrid evaluation of Linux XIA at three levels of abstraction in terms of its ability to: evolve and foster interoperation of new architectures, embed disparate architectures inside the implementation's framework, and maintain a comparable forwarding performance to that of the legacy TCP/IP implementation. Given this evaluation, we substantiate a previously unsupported claim of XIA: that it readily supports and enables network evolution, collaboration, and interoperability - traits we view as central to the success of any future Internet architecture.

Critical Infrastructure represents the basic facilities, services and installations necessary for functioning of a community, such as water, power lines, transportation, or communication systems. Any act or practice that causes a real-time Critical Infrastructure System to impair its normal function and performance will have debilitating impact on security and economy, with direct implication on the society. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system is a control system which is widely used in Critical Infrastructure System to monitor and control industrial processes autonomously. As SCADA architecture relies on computers, networks, applications and programmable controllers, it is more vulnerable to security threats/attacks. Traditional SCADA communication protocols such as IEC 60870, DNP3, IEC 61850, or Modbus did not provide any security services. Newer standards such as IEC 62351 and AGA-12 offer security features to handle the attacks on SCADA system. However there are performance issues with the cryptographic solutions of these specifications when applied to SCADA systems. This research is aimed at improving the performance of SCADA security standards by employing NTRU, a faster and light-weight NTRU public key algorithm for providing end-to-end security.

Future networks may change the way how network administrators monitor and account their users. History shows that usually a completely new design (clean slate) is used to propose a new network architecture - e.g. Network Control Protocol to TCP/IP, IPv4 to IPv6 or IP to Recursive Inter Network Architecture. The incompatibility between these architectures changes the user accounting process as network administrators have to use different information to identify a user. The paper presents a methodology how it is possible to gather all necessary information needed for smooth transition between two incompatible architectures. The transition from IPv4 and IPv6 is used as a use case, but it should be able to use the same process with any new networking architecture.