Biblio

The spread of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud services leads to a request for secure communication between devices, known as zero-trust security. The authors have been developing CYber PHysical Overlay Network over Internet Communication (CYPHONIC) to realize secure end-to-end communication among devices. A device requires installing the client program into the devices to realize secure communication over our overlay network. However, some devices refuse additional installation of external programs due to the limitation of system and hardware resources or the effect on system reliability. We proposed new technology, a CYPHONIC adapter, to support these devices. Currently, the CYPHONIC adapter supports only IPv4 virtual addresses and needs to be compatible with general devices that use IPv6. This paper proposes the dual-stack CYPHONIC adapter supporting IPv4/IPv6 virtual addresses for general devices. The prototype implementation shows that the general device can communicate over our overlay network using both IP versions through the proposed CYPHONIC adapter.

Payment systems are a critical component of everyday life in our society. While in many situations payments are still slow, opaque, siloed, expensive or even fail, users expect them to be fast, transparent, cheap, reliable and global. Recent technologies such as distributed ledgers create opportunities for near-real-time, cheaper and more transparent payments. However, in order to achieve a global payment system, payments should be possible not only within one ledger, but also across different ledgers and geographies.In this paper we propose Secure Payments with Overlay Networks (SPON), a service that enables global payments across multiple ledgers by combining the transaction exchange provided by the Interledger protocol with an intrusion-tolerant overlay of relay nodes to achieve (1) improved payment latency, (2) fault-tolerance to benign failures such as node failures and network partitions, and (3) resilience to BGP hijacking attacks. We discuss the design goals and present an implementation based on the Interledger protocol and Spines overlay network. We analyze the resilience of SPON and demonstrate through experimental evaluation that it is able to improve payment latency, recover from path outages, withstand network partition attacks, and disseminate payments fairly across multiple ledgers. We also show how SPON can be deployed to make the communication between different ledgers resilient to BGP hijacking attacks.

Highly distributed self-organizing CPS exhibit coordination schemata and communication requirements which are similar to structured overlay networks. To determine the resilience of such overlays, we analyze the connectivity of Kademlia, which has been successfully deployed in multiple applications with several thousands of nodes, e.g., BitTorrent. We measure the network connectivity within extensive simulations for different network configurations and present selected results.

Tor is a famous routing overlay network based on the Onion multi-layered encryption to support communication anonymity in a threat model in which some network nodes are malicious. However, Tor does not provide any protection against the global passive adversary. In this threat model, an idea to obtain recipient anonymity, which is enough to have relationship anonymity, is to hide the recipient among a sufficiently large anonymity set. However, this would lead to high latency both in the set-up phase (which has a quadratic cost in the number of involved nodes) and in the successive communication. In this paper, we propose a way to arrange a Tor circuit with a tree-like topology, in which the anonymity set consists of all its nodes, whereas set-up and communication latency depends on the number of the sole branch nodes (which is a small fraction of all the nodes). Basically, the cost goes down from quadratic to linear. Anonymity is obtained by applying a broadcast-based technique for the forward message, and cover traffic (generated by the terminal-chain nodes) plus mixing over branch nodes, for the response.

Anonymous Communication Networks (ACNs) are networks in which, beyond data confidentiality, also traffic flow confidentiality is provided. The most popular routing approach for ACNs also used in practice is Onion. Onion is based on multiple encryption wrapping combined with the proxy mechanism (relay nodes). However, it offers neither sender anonymity nor recipient anonymity in a global passive adversary model, simply because the adversary can observe (at the first relay node) the traffic coming from the sender, and (at the last relay node) the traffic delivered to the recipient. This may also cause a loss of relationship anonymity if timing attacks are performed. This paper presents Onion-Ring, a routing protocol that improves anonymity of Onion in the global adversary model, by achieving sender anonymity and recipient anonymity, and thus relationship anonymity.

Cyber-physical systems, which are ubiquitous in modern critical infrastructure, oftentimes rely on sending actuation commands and sensor measurements over a network, subjecting this information to potential man-in-the-middle attacks. These attacks can take the form of denial of service attacks or integrity attacks. Previous approaches at ensuring the resiliency of the overall control system against these types of attacks have leveraged functional redundancy in the system, including resilient estimation and reconfigurable control. However, these approaches are only able to ensure resiliency up to a particular subset of the actuator commands and sensor measurements being compromised. In contrast, we introduce a resiliency mechanism in this paper that can ensure safety for the overall system when all the actuator commands and sensor measurements are compromised. In addition, this approach does not require the implementation of any detection algorithm. We leverage communication redundancy in the number of pathways across the network to guarantee safety when up to a certain percentage of those pathways are compromised. The conditions under which safety is guaranteed are presented along with the resiliency mechanism itself, and our results are illustrated via simulation.

The push for data sharing and data processing across organisational boundaries creates challenges at many levels of the software stack. Data sharing and processing rely on the participating parties agreeing on the permissible operations and expressing them into actionable contracts and policies. Converting these contracts and policies into a operational infrastructure is still a matter of research and therefore begs the question how should a digital data market place infrastructure look like? In this paper we investigate how communication fabric and applications can be tightly coupled into a multi-domain overlay network which enforces accountability. We prove our concepts with a prototype which shows how a simple workflow can run across organisational boundaries.

In this article, we introduce the MACH-2K trust overlay network and its architecture. MACH-2K's objectives are to (a) enhance the resiliency of emergency response and public service networks and (b) help build such networks in places, or at times, where network infrastructure is limited. Resiliency may be enhanced in an economic manner by building new ad hoc networks of private mobile devices and joining these to public service networks at specific trusted points. The major barrier to building resiliency by using private devices is ensuring security. MACH-2K uses device location and communication utility patterns to assign trust to devices, after owner approval. After trust is established, message confidentiality, privacy, and integrity may be implemented by well-known cryptographic means. MACH-2K devices may be then requested to forward or consume different types of messages depending on their current level of trust and utility.

Moving target defense (MTD) is becoming popular with the advancements in Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. With centralized management through SDN, changing the network attributes such as routes to escape from attacks is simple and fast. Yet, the available alternate routes are bounded by the network topology, and a persistent attacker that continuously perform the reconnaissance can extract the whole link-map of the network. To address this issue, we propose to use virtual shadow networks (VSNs) by applying Network Function Virtualization (NFV) abilities to the network in order to deceive attacker with the fake topology information and not reveal the actual network topology and characteristics. We design this approach under a formal framework for Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks and apply it to the recently emerged indirect DDoS attacks, namely Crossfire, for evaluation. The results show that attacker spends more time to figure out the network behavior while the costs on the defender and network operations are negligible until reaching a certain network size.

Peer to Peer (P2P) is a dynamic and self-organized technology, popularly used in File sharing applications to achieve better performance and avoids single point of failure. The popularity of this network has attracted many attackers framing different attacks including Sybil attack, Routing Table Insertion attack (RTI) and Free Riding. Many mitigation methods are also proposed to defend or reduce the impact of such attacks. However, most of those approaches are protocol specific. In this work, we propose a Blockchain based security framework for P2P network to address such security issues. which can be tailored to any P2P file-sharing system.

The importance of peer-to-peer (P2P) network overlays produced enormous interest in the research community due to their robustness, scalability, and increase of data availability. P2P networks are overlays of logically connected hosts and other nodes including servers. P2P networks allow users to share their files without the need for any centralized servers. Since P2P networks are largely constructed of end-hosts, they are susceptible to abuse and malicious activity, such as sybil attacks. Impostors perform sybil attacks by assigning nodes multiple addresses, as opposed to a single address, with the goal of degrading network quality. Sybil nodes will spread malicious data and provide bogus responses to requests. To prevent sybil attacks from occurring, a novel defense mechanism is proposed. In the proposed scheme, the DHT key-space is divided and treated in a similar manner to radio frequency allocation incensing. An overlay of trusted nodes is used to detect and handle sybil nodes with the aid of source-destination pairs reporting on each other. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme detects sybil nodes in large sized networks with thousands of interactions.

In this paper, the correctness of the routing algorithm for the distributed key-value store based on order preserving linear hashing and Skip Graph is proved. In this system, data are divided by linear hashing and Skip Graph is used for overlay network. The routing table of this system is very uniform. Then, short detours can exist in the route of forwarding. By using these detours, the number of hops for the query forwarding is reduced.

As the Internet becomes an important part of the infrastructure our society depends on, it is crucial to construct networks that are able to work even when part of the network is compromised. This paper presents the first practical intrusion-tolerant network service, targeting high-value applications such as monitoring and control of global clouds and management of critical infrastructure for the power grid. We use an overlay approach to leverage the existing IP infrastructure while providing the required resiliency and timeliness. Our solution overcomes malicious attacks and compromises in both the underlying network infrastructure and in the overlay itself. We deploy and evaluate the intrusion-tolerant overlay implementation on a global cloud spanning East Asia, North America, and Europe, and make it publicly available.

Traffic normalization, i.e. enforcing a constant stream of fixed-length packets, is a well-known measure to completely prevent attacks based on traffic analysis. In simple configurations, the enforced traffic rate can be statically configured by a human operator, but in large virtual private networks (VPNs) the traffic pattern of many connections may need to be adjusted whenever the overlay topology or the transport capacity of the underlying infrastructure changes. We propose a rate-based congestion control mechanism for automatic adjustment of traffic patterns that does not leak any information about the actual communication. Overly strong rate throttling in response to packet loss is avoided, as the control mechanism does not change the sending rate immediately when a packet loss was detected. Instead, an estimate of the current packet loss rate is obtained and the sending rate is adjusted proportionally. We evaluate our control scheme based on a measurement study in a local network testbed. The results indicate that the proposed approach avoids network congestion, enables protected TCP flows to achieve an increased goodput, and yet ensures appropriate traffic flow confidentiality.

The main usage pattern of internet is shifting from traditional host-to-host central model to content dissemination model. It leads to the pretty prompt growth in Internet content. CDN and P2P are two mainstream techmologies to provide streaming content services in the current Internet. In recent years, some researchers have begun to focus on CDN-P2P-hybrid architecture and ISP-friendly P2P content delivery technology. Web applications have become one of the fundamental internet services. How to effectively support the popular browser-based web application is one of keys to success for future internet projects. This paper proposes ID based browser with caching in IDNet. IDNet consists of id/locator separation scheme and domain-insulated autonomous network architecture (DIANA) which redesign the future internet in the clean slate basis. Experiment shows that ID web browser with caching function can support how to disseminate content and how to find the closet network in IDNet having identical contents.

In this paper, we propose an accumulated loss recovery algorithm on overlay multicast system using Fountain codes. Fountain code successfully decodes the packet loss, but it is weak in accumulated losses on multicast tree. The proposed algorithm overcomes an accumulated loss and significantly reduces delay on overlay multicast tree.
 

Datacenter-based Cloud computing has induced new disruptive trends in networking, key among which is network virtualization. Software-Defined Networking overlays aim to improve the efficiency of the next generation multitenant datacenters. While early overlay prototypes are already available, they focus mainly on core functionality, with little being known yet about their impact on the system level performance. Using query completion time as our primary performance metric, we evaluate the overlay network impact on two representative datacenter workloads, Partition/Aggregate and 3-Tier. We measure how much performance is traded for overlay's benefits in manageability, security and policing. Finally, we aim to assist the datacenter architects by providing a detailed evaluation of the key overlay choices, all made possible by our accurate cross-layer hybrid/mesoscale simulation platform.