Matching Items (13)
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- All Subjects: Software-defined networking (Computer network technology)
- All Subjects: Access control
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Huang, Dijiang
- Creators: Ahn, Gail-Joon
- Creators: An, Ho Geun
- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Description
In this dissertation, two interrelated problems of service-based systems (SBS) are addressed: protecting users' data confidentiality from service providers, and managing performance of multiple workflows in SBS. Current SBSs pose serious limitations to protecting users' data confidentiality. Since users' sensitive data is sent in unencrypted forms to remote machines owned and operated by third-party service providers, there are risks of unauthorized use of the users' sensitive data by service providers. Although there are many techniques for protecting users' data from outside attackers, currently there is no effective way to protect users' sensitive data from service providers. In this dissertation, an approach is presented to protecting the confidentiality of users' data from service providers, and ensuring that service providers cannot collect users' confidential data while the data is processed or stored in cloud computing systems. The approach has four major features: (1) separation of software service providers and infrastructure service providers, (2) hiding the information of the owners of data, (3) data obfuscation, and (4) software module decomposition and distributed execution. Since the approach to protecting users' data confidentiality includes software module decomposition and distributed execution, it is very important to effectively allocate the resource of servers in SBS to each of the software module to manage the overall performance of workflows in SBS. An approach is presented to resource allocation for SBS to adaptively allocating the system resources of servers to their software modules in runtime in order to satisfy the performance requirements of multiple workflows in SBS. Experimental results show that the dynamic resource allocation approach can substantially increase the throughput of a SBS and the optimal resource allocation can be found in polynomial time
ContributorsAn, Ho Geun (Author) / Yau, Sik-Sang (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) is a portable, powerful, and suitable technology that integrates 3D virtual content into the physical world in real-time. It has been implemented for multiple intents as it enhances people’s interaction, e.g., shopping, entertainment, gaming, etc. Thus, MAR is expected to grow at a tremendous rate in the upcoming years, as its popularity via mobile devices has increased. But, unfortunately, the applications that implement MAR, hereby referred to as MAR-Apps, bear security issues. Such are imaged in worldwide recorded incidents caused by MAR-Apps, e.g., robberies, authorities requesting banning MAR at specific locations, etc. To further explore these concerns, a case study analyzed several MAR-Apps available in the market to identify the security problems in MAR. As a result of this study, the threats found were classified into three categories. First, Space Invasion implies the intrusive modification through MAR of sensitive spaces, e.g., hospitals, memorials, etc. Then, Space Affectation means the degradation of users’ experience via interaction with undesirable MAR or malicious entities. Finally, MAR-Apps mishandling sensitive data leads to Privacy Leaks. SpaceMediator, a proof-of-concept MAR-App that imitates the well-known and successful MAR-App Pokémon GO, implements the solution approach of a Policy-Governed MAR-App, which assists in preventing the aforementioned mentioned security issues. Furthermore, its feasibility is evaluated through a user study with 40 participants. As a result, uncovering understandability over the security issues as participants recognized and prevented them with success rates as high as 92.50%. Furthermore, there is an enriched interest in Policy-Governed MAR-Apps as 87.50% of participants agreed with restricted MAR-Apps within sensitive spaces, and 82.50% would implement constraints in MAR-Apps. These promising results encourage adopting the Policy-Governed solution approach in future MAR-Apps.
ContributorsClaramunt, Luis Manuel (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Rubio-Medrano, Carlos E (Committee member) / Baek, Jaejong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
In traditional networks the control and data plane are highly coupled, hindering development. With Software Defined Networking (SDN), the two planes are separated, allowing innovations on either one independently of the other. Here, the control plane is formed by the applications that specify an organization's policy and the data plane contains the forwarding logic. The application sends all commands to an SDN controller which then performs the requested action on behalf of the application. Generally, the requested action is a modification to the flow tables, present in the switches, to reflect a change in the organization's policy. There are a number of ways to control the network using the SDN principles, but the most widely used approach is OpenFlow.
With the applications now having direct access to the flow table entries, it is easy to have inconsistencies arise in the flow table rules. Since the flow rules are structured similar to firewall rules, the research done in analyzing and identifying firewall rule conflicts can be adapted to work with OpenFlow rules.
The main work of this thesis is to implement flow conflict detection logic in OpenDaylight and inspect the applicability of techniques in visualizing the conflicts. A hierarchical edge-bundling technique coupled with a Reingold-Tilford tree is employed to present the relationship between the conflicting rules. Additionally, a table-driven approach is also implemented to display the details of each flow.
Both types of visualization are then tested for correctness by providing them with flows which are known to have conflicts. The conflicts were identified properly and displayed by the views.
With the applications now having direct access to the flow table entries, it is easy to have inconsistencies arise in the flow table rules. Since the flow rules are structured similar to firewall rules, the research done in analyzing and identifying firewall rule conflicts can be adapted to work with OpenFlow rules.
The main work of this thesis is to implement flow conflict detection logic in OpenDaylight and inspect the applicability of techniques in visualizing the conflicts. A hierarchical edge-bundling technique coupled with a Reingold-Tilford tree is employed to present the relationship between the conflicting rules. Additionally, a table-driven approach is also implemented to display the details of each flow.
Both types of visualization are then tested for correctness by providing them with flows which are known to have conflicts. The conflicts were identified properly and displayed by the views.
ContributorsNatarajan, Janakarajan (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The increasing usage of smart-phones and mobile devices in work environment and IT
industry has brought about unique set of challenges and opportunities. ARM architecture
in particular has evolved to a point where it supports implementations across wide spectrum
of performance points and ARM based tablets and smart-phones are in demand. The
enhancements to basic ARM RISC architecture allow ARM to have high performance,
small code size, low power consumption and small silicon area. Users want their devices to
perform many tasks such as read email, play games, and run other online applications and
organizations no longer desire to provision and maintain individual’s IT equipment. The
term BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has come into being from demand of such a work
setup and is one of the motivation of this research work. It brings many opportunities such
as increased productivity and reduced costs and challenges such as secured data access,
data leakage and amount of control by the organization.
To provision such a framework we need to bridge the gap from both organizations side
and individuals point of view. Mobile device users face issue of application delivery on
multiple platforms. For instance having purchased many applications from one proprietary
application store, individuals may want to move them to a different platform/device but
currently this is not possible. Organizations face security issues in providing such a solution
as there are many potential threats from allowing BYOD work-style such as unauthorized
access to data, attacks from the devices within and outside the network.
ARM based Secure Mobile SDN framework will resolve these issues and enable employees
to consolidate both personal and business calls and mobile data access on a single device.
To address application delivery issue we are introducing KVM based virtualization that
will allow host OS to run multiple guest OS. To address the security problem we introduce
SDN environment where host would be running bridged network of guest OS using Open
vSwitch . This would allow a remote controller to monitor the state of guest OS for making
important control and traffic flow decisions based on the situation.
industry has brought about unique set of challenges and opportunities. ARM architecture
in particular has evolved to a point where it supports implementations across wide spectrum
of performance points and ARM based tablets and smart-phones are in demand. The
enhancements to basic ARM RISC architecture allow ARM to have high performance,
small code size, low power consumption and small silicon area. Users want their devices to
perform many tasks such as read email, play games, and run other online applications and
organizations no longer desire to provision and maintain individual’s IT equipment. The
term BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has come into being from demand of such a work
setup and is one of the motivation of this research work. It brings many opportunities such
as increased productivity and reduced costs and challenges such as secured data access,
data leakage and amount of control by the organization.
To provision such a framework we need to bridge the gap from both organizations side
and individuals point of view. Mobile device users face issue of application delivery on
multiple platforms. For instance having purchased many applications from one proprietary
application store, individuals may want to move them to a different platform/device but
currently this is not possible. Organizations face security issues in providing such a solution
as there are many potential threats from allowing BYOD work-style such as unauthorized
access to data, attacks from the devices within and outside the network.
ARM based Secure Mobile SDN framework will resolve these issues and enable employees
to consolidate both personal and business calls and mobile data access on a single device.
To address application delivery issue we are introducing KVM based virtualization that
will allow host OS to run multiple guest OS. To address the security problem we introduce
SDN environment where host would be running bridged network of guest OS using Open
vSwitch . This would allow a remote controller to monitor the state of guest OS for making
important control and traffic flow decisions based on the situation.
ContributorsChowdhary, Ankur (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Access control has been historically recognized as an effective technique for ensuring that computer systems preserve important security properties. Recently, attribute-based
access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation
by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner.
However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.
access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation
by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner.
However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.
ContributorsRubio Medrano, Carlos Ernesto (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm that decouples the control plane from the data plane, which allows network administrators to consolidate common network services into a centralized module named SDN controller. Applications’ policies are transformed into standardized network rules in the data plane via SDN controller. Even though this centralization brings a great flexibility and programmability to the network, network rules generated by SDN applications cannot be trusted because there may exist malicious SDN applications, and insecure network flows can be made due to complex relations across network rules. In this dissertation, I investigate how to identify and resolve these security violations in SDN caused by the combination of network rules and applications’ policies. To this end, I propose a systematic policy management framework that better protects SDN itself and hardens existing network defense mechanisms using SDN.
More specifically, I discuss the following four security challenges in this dissertation: (1) In SDN, generating reliable network rules is challenging because SDN applications cannot be trusted and have complicated dependencies each other. To address this problem, I analyze applications’ policies and remove those dependencies by applying grid-based policy decomposition mechanism; (2) One network rule could accidentally affect others (or by malicious users), which lead to creating of indirect security violations. I build systematic and automated tools that analyze network rules in the data plane to detect a wide range of security violations and resolve them in an automated fashion; (3) A fundamental limitation of current SDN protocol (OpenFlow) is a lack of statefulness, which is extremely important to several security applications such as stateful firewall. To bring statelessness to SDN-based environment, I come up with an innovative stateful monitoring scheme by extending existing OpenFlow specifications; (4) Existing honeynet architecture is suffering from its limited functionalities of ’data control’ and ’data capture’. To address this challenge, I design and implement an innovative next generation SDN-based honeynet architecture.
More specifically, I discuss the following four security challenges in this dissertation: (1) In SDN, generating reliable network rules is challenging because SDN applications cannot be trusted and have complicated dependencies each other. To address this problem, I analyze applications’ policies and remove those dependencies by applying grid-based policy decomposition mechanism; (2) One network rule could accidentally affect others (or by malicious users), which lead to creating of indirect security violations. I build systematic and automated tools that analyze network rules in the data plane to detect a wide range of security violations and resolve them in an automated fashion; (3) A fundamental limitation of current SDN protocol (OpenFlow) is a lack of statefulness, which is extremely important to several security applications such as stateful firewall. To bring statelessness to SDN-based environment, I come up with an innovative stateful monitoring scheme by extending existing OpenFlow specifications; (4) Existing honeynet architecture is suffering from its limited functionalities of ’data control’ and ’data capture’. To address this challenge, I design and implement an innovative next generation SDN-based honeynet architecture.
ContributorsHan, Wonkyu (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Zhao, Ziming (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Wireless communication technologies have been playing an important role in modern society. Due to its inherent mobility property, wireless networks are more vulnerable to passive attacks than traditional wired networks. Anonymity, as an important issue in mobile network environment, serves as the first topic that leads to all the research work presented in this manuscript. Specifically, anonymity issue in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) is discussed with details as the first section of research.
To thoroughly study on this topic, the presented work approaches it from an attacker's perspective. Under a perfect scenario, all the traffic in a targeted MANET exhibits the communication relations to a passive attacker. However, localization errors pose a significant influence on the accuracy of the derived communication patterns. To handle such issue, a new scheme is proposed to generate super nodes, which represent the activities of user groups in the target MANET. This scheme also helps reduce the scale of monitoring work by grouping users based on their behaviors.
The first part of work on anonymity in MANET leads to the thought on its major cause. The link-based communication pattern is a key contributor to the success of the traffic analysis attack. A natural way to circumvent such issue is to use link-less approaches. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a typical instance of such kind. Its communication pattern is able to overcome the anonymity issue with MANET. However, it also comes with its own shortcomings. One of them is access control enforcement. To tackle this issue, a new naming scheme for contents transmitted in ICN networks is presented. This scheme is based on a new Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) algorithm. It enforces access control in ICN with minimum requirements on additional network components.
Following the research work on ABE, an important function, delegation, exhibits a potential security issue. In traditional ABE schemes, Ciphertext-Policy ABE (CP-ABE), a user is able to generate a subset of authentic attribute key components for other users using delegation function. This capability is not monitored or controlled by the trusted third party (TTP) in the cryptosystem. A direct threat caused from this issue is that any user may intentionally or unintentionally lower the standards for attribute assignments. Unauthorized users/attackers may be able to obtain their desired attributes through a delegation party instead of directly from the TTP. As the third part of work presented in this manuscript, a three-level delegation restriction architecture is proposed. Furthermore, a delegation restriction scheme following this architecture is also presented. This scheme allows the TTP to have full control on the delegation function of all its direct users.
To thoroughly study on this topic, the presented work approaches it from an attacker's perspective. Under a perfect scenario, all the traffic in a targeted MANET exhibits the communication relations to a passive attacker. However, localization errors pose a significant influence on the accuracy of the derived communication patterns. To handle such issue, a new scheme is proposed to generate super nodes, which represent the activities of user groups in the target MANET. This scheme also helps reduce the scale of monitoring work by grouping users based on their behaviors.
The first part of work on anonymity in MANET leads to the thought on its major cause. The link-based communication pattern is a key contributor to the success of the traffic analysis attack. A natural way to circumvent such issue is to use link-less approaches. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a typical instance of such kind. Its communication pattern is able to overcome the anonymity issue with MANET. However, it also comes with its own shortcomings. One of them is access control enforcement. To tackle this issue, a new naming scheme for contents transmitted in ICN networks is presented. This scheme is based on a new Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) algorithm. It enforces access control in ICN with minimum requirements on additional network components.
Following the research work on ABE, an important function, delegation, exhibits a potential security issue. In traditional ABE schemes, Ciphertext-Policy ABE (CP-ABE), a user is able to generate a subset of authentic attribute key components for other users using delegation function. This capability is not monitored or controlled by the trusted third party (TTP) in the cryptosystem. A direct threat caused from this issue is that any user may intentionally or unintentionally lower the standards for attribute assignments. Unauthorized users/attackers may be able to obtain their desired attributes through a delegation party instead of directly from the TTP. As the third part of work presented in this manuscript, a three-level delegation restriction architecture is proposed. Furthermore, a delegation restriction scheme following this architecture is also presented. This scheme allows the TTP to have full control on the delegation function of all its direct users.
ContributorsLi, Bing (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
With the software-defined networking trend growing, several network virtualization controllers have been developed in recent years. These controllers, also called network hypervisors, attempt to manage physical SDN based networks so that multiple tenants can safely share the same forwarding plane hardware without risk of being affected by or affecting other tenants. However, many areas remain unexplored by current network hypervisor implementations. This thesis presents and evaluates some of the features offered by network hypervisors, such as full header space availability, isolation, and transparent traffic forwarding capabilities for tenants. Flow setup time and throughput are also measured and compared among different network hypervisors. Three different network hypervisors are evaluated: FlowVisor, VeRTIGO and OpenVirteX. These virtualization tools are assessed with experiments conducted on three different testbeds: an emulated Mininet scenario, a physical single-switch testbed, and also a remote GENI testbed. The results indicate that network hypervisors bring SDN flexibility to network virtualization, making it easier for network administrators to define with precision how the network is sliced and divided among tenants. This increased flexibility, however, may come with the cost of decreased performance, and also brings additional risks of interoperability due to a lack of standardization of virtualization methods.
ContributorsStall Rechia, Felipe (Author) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Smartphones are pervasive nowadays. They are supported by mobile platforms that allow users to download and run feature-rich mobile applications (apps). While mobile apps help users conveniently process personal data on mobile devices, they also pose security and privacy threats and put user's data at risk. Even though modern mobile platforms such as Android have integrated security mechanisms to protect users, most mechanisms do not easily adapt to user's security requirements and rapidly evolving threats. They either fail to provide sufficient intelligence for a user to make informed security decisions, or require great sophistication to configure the mechanisms for enforcing security decisions. These limitations lead to a situation where users are disadvantageous against emerging malware on modern mobile platforms. To remedy this situation, I propose automated and systematic approaches to address three security management tasks: monitoring, assessment, and confinement of mobile apps. In particular, monitoring apps helps a user observe and record apps' runtime behaviors as controlled under security mechanisms. Automated assessment distills intelligence from the observed behaviors and the security configurations of security mechanisms. The distilled intelligence further fuels enhanced confinement mechanisms that flexibly and accurately shape apps' behaviors. To demonstrate the feasibility of my approaches, I design and implement a suite of proof-of-concept prototypes that support the three tasks respectively.
ContributorsJing, Yiming (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Security has been one of the top concerns in cloud community while cloud resource abuse and malicious insiders are considered as top threats. Traditionally, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) have been widely deployed to manipulate cloud security, with the latter one providing additional prevention capability. However, as one of the most creative networking technologies, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is rarely used to implement IDPS in the cloud computing environment because the lack of comprehensive development framework and processing flow. Simply migration from traditional IDS/IPS systems to SDN environment are not effective enough for detecting and defending malicious attacks. Hence, in this thesis, we present an IPS development framework to help user easily design and implement their defensive systems in cloud system by SDN technology. This framework enables SDN approaches to enhance the system security and performance. A Traffic Information Platform (TIP) is proposed as the cornerstone with several upper layer security modules such as Detection, Analysis and Prevention components. Benefiting from the flexible, compatible and programmable features of SDN, Customized Detection Engine, Network Topology Finder, Source Tracer and further user-developed security appliances are plugged in our framework to construct a SDN-based defensive system. Two main categories Python-based APIs are designed to support developers for further development. This system is designed and implemented based on the POX controller and Open vSwitch in the cloud computing environment. The efficiency of this framework is demonstrated by a sample IPS implementation and the performance of our framework is also evaluated.
ContributorsXiong, Zhengyang (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Dalvucu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014