Neighbor Selection Attacks in Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems

ABSTRACT

P2P streaming has grown in popularity, allowing people in many places to
benefit from live audio and television services.  The proliferation of
these applications on the public Internet raises questions about how they
can be deployed in a secure and robust manner.

In this talk, we focus on neighbor selection attacks in tree-based and
mesh-based P2P streaming which allow insider attackers to control the
overlay formation and maintenance.  We demonstrate the effect of the
attacks against a tree-based and mesh-based P2P streaming system and
propose a solution to mitigate the attacks. Our solution is scalable, has
low overhead, and works in realistic heterogeneous networks. We evaluate
our solution using a tree-based and a mesh-based P2P streaming system with
real-world experiments on the PlanetLab Internet testbed.

BIO

Cristina Nita-Rotaru is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Computer Science at Purdue University where she established the Dependable
and Secure Distributed Systems Laboratory and is an active member of the
Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security
(CERIAS). She received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2003.
She received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2006 and
Purdue Teaching for Tomorrow Award in 2007. She has served on the
Technical Program Committee of numerous conferences in security,
networking and distributed systems. Her research interests lie in security
of distributed systems and network protocols.

Thinking about Arms Races

ABSTRACT

"But its an arms race" is a common refrain in computer security research,
often used to dismiss an imperfect solution. Yet the reality is, although
computer security is a competition, the arms races are asymmetric: either
the attacker or defender might have a substantial advantage, which often
comes down to either an asset of the attacker (such as the need to only
succeed once), the defender (such as control over the network), relative
decision cycle speed, or reducing to a hard problem. In this talk I will
discuss various aspects of what it means to be in an arms race, and some of
the practical and theoretical limits on both sides that I've experienced
with various aspects of my research, including worm defense, network
integrity, and network measurement. 

BIO

Nicholas Weaver is a researcher at the International Computer Science
Institute.  His specialty is intrusion detections, worms, malcode, and
being a general paranoid person.

Anonymous Mobility in Suspicious MANETs

ABSTRACT

In many traditional mobile network scenarios, nodes establish
communication on the basis of (public) identities. However, in some
hostile and suspicious MANET settings, node identities must not be
exposed and node movements must not be traceable. Instead, nodes need
to communicate on the basis of their current locations. In this work,
we address some interesting issues arising in such MANETs by
designing an anonymous routing framework (ALARM). It uses nodes'
current locations to construct a secure MANET "map". Based on the
current map, each node can decide which other nodes it wants to
communicate with. ALARM takes advantage of some advanced
cryptographic primitives to achieve node authentication, data
integrity, anonymity and untraceability (tracking-resistance). It
also offers resistance to insider (including Sybil) attacks.

BIO

Gene Tsudik is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at
the University of California, Irvine. He has been conducting research
in internetworking, network security and applied cryptography since
1987. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from USC in 1991 for
research on firewalls and Internet access control. Before coming to
UC Irvine in 2000, he was a Project Leader at IBM Zurich Research
Laboratory (1991-1996) and USC Information Science Institute
(1996-2000). Over the years, his research interests included:
routing, firewalls, authentication, mobile networks, e-commerce,
anonymity, group communication, digital signatures, key management,
ad hoc networks, as well as database privacy and secure storage.
Between 2003 and 2007, Professor Tsudik served as the Associate Dean
of Research and Graduate Studies in the School of Information and
Computer Sciences at UCI. He spent April-September 2007 in Italy as a
Fulbright Scholar lecturing and conducting research at the University
of Rome (La Sapienza).

 
Policy-driven Distributed Authorization: Status and Prospects

Marianne Winslett received her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford
University in 1987. She has been an assistant, associate, full, and
adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Illinois. Her research interests are in databases and
related areas, especially security in open systems and parallel I/O
for high-performance scientific computation. She received a
Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science
Foundation in 1989 and Xerox Awards for Faculty Research in 1990 and
1997. She is currently on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on
Database Systems and is a former editor for IEEE Transactions on
Knowledge and Data Engineering and the vice-chair of ACM SIGMOD.
Marianne is a Fellow of the ACM.