Keeping the Network Available with SDNProbe and DAMUP

Abstract:

This talk will cover two security mechanisms for enhancing network availability. In the first half of the talk, I will present a lightweight fault localization scheme for catching in-network adversaries that disrupt packet forwarding. Probe-based fault localization identifies potential faulty nodes, which are manually inspected for confirmation. Prior work suffers from either high bandwidth overhead or false detection (i.e., incorrectly attributing good nodes or missing faulty nodes), especially in the presence of multiple or inconsistent faults. We propose SDNProbe, a lightweight SDN application that sends a provably minimized number of probe packets to pinpoint malfunctioning switches. Using realistic topologies and flow rules, our evaluation results confirm that SDNProbe can rapidly localize faulty switches while reducing the number of required test packets by 30%, compared to prior approaches. In the second half of the talk, I will turn the focus to widely deployed cloud-based DDoS mitigation techniques and their privacy concerns. Existing cloud-based approaches severely violate user privacy as they intercept HTTPS to uncover non-volumetric attacks. We propose DAMUP, a practical and privacy-aware solution that empowers the cloud to blindly filter encrypted traffic while remaining deployable on the current Internet. DAMUP is designed to be deployable on the current Internet because it requires no modification to the Internet architecture, e.g., leveraging the Server Name Indication field in the TLS handshake to exchange tokens. Our evaluation shows that DAMUP can significantly improve the connection success rate from 11.4% to 99.8% under HTTP(S) floods.


Biodata:

Dr. Hsu-Chun Hsiao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, and the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia at National Taiwan University. She also holds an adjunct assistant researcher position in the Center of Information Technology and Innovation at Academia Sinica. Dr. Hsiao completed her B.S. (2006) and M.S. (2008) at National Taiwan University and Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University (2014). Dr. Hsiao's research interests lie in the field of network and systems security, and her recent work focuses on DDoS defense, IoT security, and automated vulnerability discovery. She is a recipient of the MOST Young Scholar Fellowship (2018-2023) and the NTU Excellent Teaching Award (2016, 2017).