Networking, wired

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Visible to the public  TWC: Small: Collaborative: Multipath TCP Side Channel Vulnerabilities and Defenses

Submitted by Zhiyun Qian on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 8:34am

The objective of this project is to understand and strengthen the security of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) - an IETF standardized suite of TCP extensions that allow one MPTCP connection, consisting of multiple sub-connections between two hosts, to use multiple paths simultaneously. Even though MPTCP has been gaining momentum in being widely deployed, its security is yet to be well understood. The project is expected to raise awareness of MPTCP security and ultimately yield a foundation for MPTCP security.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Handling a Trillion Unfixable Flaws on Billions of Internet-of-Things

Submitted by vsekar on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 8:03am

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has quickly moved from concept to reality, with estimates that the number of deployed IoT devices will rise to 25 billion in 2020. However, studies show that many IoT devices have serious security vulnerabilities. Moreover, the limitations of IoT devices and scale of networks of IoT devices often make traditional IT security approaches impractical.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Managing User-Level Compromises in Enterprise Networks

Submitted by Craig Shue on Mon, 10/23/2017 - 6:09pm

Organizations need to protect their computer systems from attackers. They often group their own computers into risk pools to reduce threat propagation and monitor the communication between these groups. Unfortunately, this boundary monitoring is unable to see traffic within groups and, since each monitor is segmented, they cannot form a holistic picture of the entire network. Finally, modern approaches must examine network traffic in isolation, without the ability to know what action on the originating computer caused it.

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Visible to the public TWC SBE: TTP Option: Medium: Collaborative: EPICA: Empowering People to Overcome Information Controls and Attacks

Submitted by Wenke Lee on Mon, 10/23/2017 - 1:48pm

This project studies the security of representative personalized services, such as search engines, news aggregators, and on-line targeted advertising, and identifies vulnerabilities in service components that can be exploited by pollution attacks to deliver contents intended by attackers.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: PERMIT: Privacy-Enabled Resource Management for IoT Networks

Submitted by asarwate on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 2:33pm

This project investigates how privacy can be used to inform the design and management of future data sensing systems. Networked systems that collect data about individuals will play an increasingly important role in our lives, with applications including industrial monitoring and control, "smart" homes/cities, and personalized health care. These systems will gather private information about individuals, which creates many coupled engineering challenges.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Linking the Unlinkable: Design, Analysis, and Implementation of Network Flow Fingerprints for Fine-grained Traffic Analysis

Submitted by Amir Houmansadr on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 2:00pm

Network traffic analysts are currently unable to link network flows across wide area networks to determine the origin of a network traffic flow, which is critical in understanding sources of attacks. This project is developing a novel technique for linking network flows, called flow fingerprinting, that could help help network defenders identify the origin of a network-based attack or help law enforcement track the source of criminal activity. The work could also reveal weaknesses that must be addressed in systems that protect users online anonymity.

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Visible to the public CAREER: Sustainable Censorship Resistance Systems for the Next Decade

Submitted by Amir Houmansadr on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 1:57pm

The Internet enables people around the world to communicate, fostering free speech, a free press, and democracy. For billions of people, however, the freedom to communicate via the Internet is regulated, monitored and restricted by governments or corporations. To combat such censorship, researchers have designed and deployed a variety of censorship circumvention systems. Unfortunately, such systems have been designed based on ad hoc heuristics (rather than on solid, theoretical foundations) and can be defeated by typical state-level censors.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: A Unifying Framework For Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Secure Communication Protocols

Submitted by Alexandra Boldyreva on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 12:15pm

Many networking protocols have been designed without security in mind, and many cryptographic schemes have been designed without practical deployments in mind. Moreover, most of security-enhanced communication protocols still lack the provable-security treatment and hence the security guarantees. This project aims at bridging the gap between protocol design, implementation, deployment, and security guarantees by developing a novel general security framework that facilitates the provable-security analyses of practical networking protocols.

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Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Small: Collaborative: Enhancing Anonymity Network Resilience against Pervasive Internet Attacks

Submitted by RDingledine on Fri, 10/13/2017 - 1:42pm

Large-scale Internet censorship prevents citizens of many parts of the world from accessing vast amounts of otherwise publicly available information. The recognition and publication of these censorship events have aided in motivating the development of new privacy-enhancing technologies to circumvent the censor. We argue that as circumvention technologies improve and the cost of detecting their use increases, adversaries that are intent on restricting access to information will seek out alternative techniques for disruption.