SaTC: CORE: Small: Towards Secure and Reliable Network Tomography in Wireline and Wireless Networks

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Today's networks, such as the Internet, cellular networks, and the Internet of Things, provide ubiquitous wired or wireless connections over large areas. Secure and reliable operations are among the most important objectives in these networks. Network tomography has become a promising framework for accurate monitoring of network operation status, which is vital to ensure an efficient and reliable network environment. However, this measurement process can be exploited by malicious attackers to generate falsified, misleading measurement or monitoring results, which significantly affects follow-on network operations based on these results, and accordingly degrades the operational reliability and health of today's networks. The goal of this project is to analyze security vulnerabilities, understand potential security attack strategies and their impact, and design effective defense mechanisms against such attacks. The research in this project will extend the technical knowledge of security vulnerabilities, attacks and defense during network measurement. The project will also offer undergraduate students opportunities to gain research experiences in network measurement and security. The project focuses on investigating a new class of security attacks, called measurement integrity attacks, during the measurement process in network tomography. Unlike conventional data integrity problems that can be usually protected by standard security methods (e.g., encryption and authentication), a key challenge in measurement integrity attacks is that the network event data (e.g., packet transmission/delivery timings and loss) during measurement is not protected by standard security methods, but can be easily manipulated by an inside attacker. This project aims at (i) creating the theoretical foundation to analyze the feasibility and impact of measurement integrity attacks with different attack strategies in wireline and wireless scenarios, (ii) designing robust attack detection and localization methods, and analyzing the effectiveness of such countermeasures, (iii) investigating efficient management methods for network measurement to increase the attack resilience in a network, and (iv) conducting comprehensive evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of attack countermeasures in both wireline and wireless networks.