GENI: EAGER: GENI Experiments to Explore Adoption of New Security Services

This EAGER project will carry out three classes of experiments on GENI, all related to security and privacy and all involving low-level network facilities. Of particular interest is the issue of adoptability: will real users (system administrators) accept novel security solutions and under what circumstances? Three experiments are proposed to address these challenges.

The first experiment focuses on a monitoring system to detect infrastructure attacks: Currently, the protocol WATCHERS is known to be able to detect almost all attacks on routers, but its behavior under realistic network traffic is unknown. This experiment will ask questions like: What is the effect of monitoring on the infrastructure itself? How do the benefits of monitoring weighed against the cost of monitoring affect the adoption of the service by autonomous network entities?

The second experiment is focused on attack mitigation with modified infrastructure services. Specifically, they will investigate how incremental adoption of a DNS protocol modification might affect the global domain name service when both standard and modified protocols operate simultaneously. Key questions are: Does a new infrastructure attack mitigation scheme interfere with the vulnerable service in widespread use? How do the new and old services compete with one another during the adoption phase?

The third experiment focuses on distributed private online social networking. The PIs propose to explore deployment of secure and privacy-flexible p2p-client platforms for migrating from a centralized to a decentralized peer-to-peer social on-line network. The PIs are proposing to develop a social caching/name-resolution server, analogous to DNS for IP networks, to assist the p2p clients (or super peers) connected through GENI as they manage their privacy settings for their communities of interest. Key questions are: how can superpeers identify communities of interest and other social groups? Can they interface with centralized social networking frameworks, like facebook? Can they aid in the protection of privacy of their constituent clients?

As for the broader impacts, GENI will be used for experimentation in six security-related university classes. The PIs also participate in the UC Davis COSMOS (Computer Security, Privacy, and Cybervillainy) program, which provides high achieving high school students the opportunity to explore advanced topics in math and science in a university setting. Laboratory experimentation is 30% of the COSMOS program curricula for which GENI will serve as an ideal platform.