RINGS: NextSec: Zero-Trust, Programmable and Verifiable Security Transformation for NextG

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NextG network systems are expected to connect billions of heterogeneous Internet of Thing (IoT) devices along with billions of people, enable machine-to-machine communications, and provide low-latency computational and storage resources on-demand at the devices and in the cloud. In NextG, many services will run dynamically as lightweight functionalities close to users to support ultra-low latency when storing/processing extremely critical data, for example, from autonomous vehicles and tele-surgery. Historically, however, many of these services have been developed/deployed with no security in mind, or simply with security as a reactive add-on. This kind of security practice may beget life-threatening consequences for critical NextG applications/services. The project’s novelties are the introduction of a revolutionary capability for secure architecture for NextG and a system, NextSec, that enhances the security of NextG services. This project provides a solid foundation and collaborative community for future system and network security research. The project team incorporate insights and results from this work into relevant courses, recruit/educate underrepresented students in computing, and transfer the developed technology to industry. To address the challenges in the secure composition of microservices in the pervasive, distributed user-to-edge-to-cloud continuum of NextG network systems, this project has three research thrusts. The concept of security transformation is new for addressing the various security issues of microservices. The Programmable Security thrust provides new primitives for supporting a software-defined way of enforcing user-to-edge-to-cloud security. Finally, the extended Maximal Causality Reduction methods offer efficient, scalable verification of complex security properties across microservices. The framework has been evaluated on Texas A&M Commercial 4G/5G Advanced Wireless Application Research Environment (AWARE) testbed.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.