Traditional communication networks consist of large sets of vendor-specific manually configurable devices which are hardwired with specific control logic or algorithms. The resulting networks comprise distributed control plane architectures that are complex in nature, difficult to integrate and operate, and are least efficient in terms of resource usage. However, the rapid increase in data traffic requires an integrated use of diverse access technologies and autonomic network operations with increased efficiency. Therefore, the concepts of Software Defined Networking (SDN) are proposed that decouple the network control plane from the data-forwarding plane. The SDN control plane can integrate a diverse set of devices, and tune them at run-time through vendor-agnostic programmable Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This thesis proposes software defined cognitive networking to enable intelligent use of network resources. Different radio access technologies, including cognitive radios, are integrated through a common control platform to increase the overall network performance. The architectural framework of software defined cognitive networking is presented alongside the experimental performance evaluation. Since SDN enables applications to change the network behavior and centralizes the network control plane to oversee the whole network, it is highly important to investigate security of SDNs. Therefore, this thesis finds potential security vulnerabilities in SDN, studies proposed security platforms and architectures for those vulnerabilities, and presents future directions for unresolved security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, this thesis also investigates the potential security challenges and their solutions for the enabling technologies of 5G, such as SDN, cloud technologies, and virtual network functions, and provides key insights into increasing the security of 5G networks.
Securely sharing and managing personal content is a challenging task in multi-device environments. In this paper, we design and implement a new platform called Personal Content Networking (PCN). Our work is inspired by Content-Centric Networking (CCN) because we aim to enable access to personal content using its name instead of its location. The unique challenge of PCN is to support secure file operations such as replication, updates, and access control over distributed untrusted devices. The primary contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a secure content management plat…
Bluetooth (BT) has revolutionized close-range communication enabling smart capabilities in everyday devices through wireless technology. One of the most important sub-domains of Internet-of-Things (IoT) specializes in the usage of BT technologies to develop smart homes and environments, which include hospitals, buildings, shopping facilities, etc. to offer a wide-range of features, like instantaneous and remote access to ventilation, lighting, security, localization, and tracking. However, the deployment of such features in smart infrastructures are typically unaccompanied by appropriate secur…
The secure distribution of protected content requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional method of end-to-end encryption. However, in information-centric networking (ICN) the end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted content stored in a cache is useless for any consumer except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted content in ICN, we propose a novel scheme, called the Secure Distribution of Protected Content (SDPC). SDPC ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. The SDPC is a lightweight…
Security is an increasingly fundamental requirement in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). However, the pace of adoption of secure mechanisms has been slow, which we estimate to be a consequence of the performance overhead of traditional solutions and of the complexity of the support infrastructure required. As a first step to addressing these problems, we propose a modular secure SDN control plane communications architecture, KISS, with innovative solutions in the context of key distribution and secure channel support. A comparative analysis of the performance impact of essential security prim…
The benefits of the ubiquitous caching in ICN are profound, such features make ICN promising for content distribution, but it also introduces a challenge to content protection against the unauthorized access. The protection of a content against unauthorized access requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional end-to-end encryption. However, in information-centric networking (ICN), such end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted contents stored in a cache are useless for any consumers except those who know the encryption key. For effective cachi…
Limited spectrum resources and dramatic growth of high data rate applications have motivated opportunistic spectrum access utilizing the promising concept of cognitive networks. Although this concept has emerged primarily to enhance spectrum utilization and to allow the coexistence of heterogeneous network technologies, the importance of energy consumption imposes additional challenges, because energy consumption and communication performance can be at odds. In this paper, the approaches for energy efficient spectrum sensing and spectrum handoff, fundamental building blocks of cognitive networ…
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a communication paradigm that emphasizes content distribution. Named-Data Networking (NDN) is an instantiation of CCN, a candidate Future Internet Architecture. NDN supports human-readable content naming and router-based content caching which lends itself to efficient, secure, and scalable content distribution. Because of NDN's fundamental requirement that each content object must be signed by its producer, fragmentation has been considered incompatible with NDN since it precludes authentication of individual content fragments by routers. The alternative is …
Current designs of future In-Vehicle Networks (IVN) prepare for switched Ethernet backbones, which can host advanced LAN technologies such as IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). In this paper, we present an integrated Time-Sensitive Software-Defined Networking (TSSDN) architecture that simultaneously enables control of synchronous and asynchronous real-time and best-effort communication for all IVN traffic classes. Despite the central SDN controller, we can validate that control can operate without a delay penalty for TSN traffic, provided protocols are …
The field of wireless networks has been rapidly developed during the past decade due to the increasing popularity of the mobile devices. The great demand for mobility and connectivity makes wireless networking a field whose continuous technological development is very important as new challenges and issues are arising. Many scientists and researchers are currently engaged in developing new approaches and optimization methods in several topics of wireless networking. This survey paper study works from the following topics: Cognitive Radio Networks, Interactive Broadcasting, Energy Efficient Net…
Cloud architecture has become a valuable solution for different applications, such as big data analytics, due to its high-degree of availability, scalability and strategic value. However, there still remain challenges in managing cloud architecture, in areas such as cloud security. In this paper, we exploit software-defined networking (SDN) and blockchain technologies to secure cloud management platforms from a networking perspective. We develop a blockchain-powered SDN-enabled networking infrastructure in which the integration between blockchain-based security and autonomy management layer an…
The holy grail of networking is to create \textit{cognitive networks} that organize, manage, and drive themselves. Such a vision now seems attainable thanks in large part to the progress in the field of machine learning (ML), which has now already disrupted a number of industries and revolutionized practically all fields of research. But are the ML models foolproof and robust to security attacks to be in charge of managing the network? Unfortunately, many modern ML models are easily misled by simple and easily-crafted adversarial perturbations, which does not bode well for the future of ML-bas…
Mobile cloud computing is a very strong candidate for the title "Next Generation Network" which empowers mobile users with extended mobility, service continuity and superior performance. Users can expect to execute their jobs faster, with lower battery consumption and affordable prices; however this is not always the case. Various mobile applications have been developed to take advantage of this new technology, but each application has its own requirements. Several mobile cloud architectures have been proposed but none was suitable for all mobile applications which resulted in lower customer s…
This paper presents a secure communication application called DiscoverFriends. Its purpose is to securely communicate to a group of online friends while bypassing their respective social networking servers under a mobile ad hoc network environment. DiscoverFriends leverages Bloom filters and a hybrid encryption technique with a self-organized public-key management scheme to securely identify friends and provide authentication. Additionally, DiscoverFriends enables anonymous location check-ins by utilizing a new cryptographic primitive called Function Secret Sharing. Finally, to the best of our…
Modern digitally controlled systems require multiparty authentication and authorization to meet the desired security requirement. This paper describes the design and development of NDN-MPS, an automated solution to support multiparty signature signing and verification for NDN-enabled applications. NDN-MPS suggests several changes and extensions to the existing NDN security solutions. First, it introduces a new type of trust schema to support signing and verification for multiple signers under complex policies such as threshold schemes. Second, it extends the NDN signature format to accommodate…
In this paper, we consider context-awareness to enhance route reliability and robustness in multi-hop cognitive networks. A novel context-aware route discovery protocol is presented to enable secondary users to select the route according to their QoS requirements. The protocol facilitates adjacent relay selection under different criteria, such as shortest available path, route reliability and relay reputation. New routing and security-based metrics are defined to measure route robustness in spatial, frequency and temporal domains. Secure throughput, defined as the percentage of traffic not bei…
Trends like Industry 4.0 will pose new challenges for future industrial networks. Greater interconnectedness, higher data volumes as well as new requirements for speeds as well as security will make new approaches necessary. Performanceoptimized networking techniques will be demanded to implement new use cases, like network separation and isolation, in a secure fashion. A new and highly efficient protocol, that will be vital for that purpose, is MACsec. It is a Layer 2 encryption protocol that was previously extended specifically for industrial environments. Yet, it lacks the ability to bridge…
Secured opportunistic Medium Access Control (MAC) and complexity reduction in channel estimation are proposed in the Cross layer design Cognitive Radio Networks deploying the secured dynamic channel allocation from the endorsed channel reservation. Channel Endorsement and Transmission policy is deployed to optimize the free channel selection as well as channel utilization to cognitive radio users. This strategy provide the secured and reliable link to secondary users as well as the collision free link to primary users between the physical and MAC layers which yields the better network performa…
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a new class of network architectures designed to address some key limitations of the current IP-based Internet. One of its main features is in-network content caching, which allows requests for content to be served by routers. Despite improved bandwidth utilization and lower latency for popular content retrieval, in-network content caching offers producers no means of collecting information about content that is requested and later served from network caches. Such information is often needed for accounting purposes. In this paper, we design some secure accou…
Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inte…
Information-Centric Networking is a promising networking paradigm that overcomes many of the limitations of current networking architectures. Various research efforts investigate solutions for securing ICN. Nevertheless, most of these solutions relax security requirements in favor of network performance. In particular, they weaken end-user privacy and the architecture's tolerance to security breaches in order to support middleboxes that offer services such as caching and content replication. In this paper, we adapt TLS, a widely used security standard, to an ICN context. We design solutions th…
As radio spectrum usage paradigm moving from the traditional command and control allocation scheme to the open spectrum allocation scheme, wireless networks meet new opportunities and challenges. In this article we introduce the concept of cognitive wireless mesh (CogMesh) networks and address the unique problem in such a network. CogMesh is a self-organized distributed network architecture combining cognitive technologies with the mesh structure in order to provide a uniform service platform over a wide range of networks. It is based on dynamic spectrum access (DSA) and featured by self-organ…
As 5th Generation research reaches the twilight, the research community must go beyond 5G and look towards the 2030 connectivity landscape, namely 6G. In this context, this work takes a step towards the 6G vision by proposing a next generation communication platform, which aims to extend the rigid coverage area of fixed deployment networks by considering virtual mobile small cells (MSC) that are created on demand. Relying on emerging computing paradigms such as NFV (Network Function Virtualization) and SDN (Software Defined Networking), these cells can harness radio and networking capability l…
Traditionally, wireless network protocols have been designed for performance. Subsequently, as attacks have been identified, patches have been developed. This has resulted in an "arms race" development process of discovering vulnerabilities and then patching them. The fundamental difficulty with this approach is that other vulnerabilities may still exist. No provable security or performance guarantees can ever be provided. We develop a system-theoretic approach to security that provides a complete protocol suite with provable guarantees, as well as proof of min-max optimality with respect to a…
Ensuring that information flowing through a network is secure from manipulation and eavesdropping by unauthorized parties is an important task for network administrators. Many cyber attacks rely on a lack of network-level information flow controls to successfully compromise a victim network. Once an adversary exploits an initial entry point, they can eavesdrop and move laterally within the network (e.g., scan and penetrate internal nodes) to further their malicious goals. In this paper, we propose a novel multilevel security (MLS) framework to enforce a secure inter-node information flow polic…
Over the past decade, online social networks (OSNs) such as Twitter and Facebook have thrived and experienced rapid growth to over 1 billion users. A major evolution would be to leverage the characteristics of OSNs to evaluate the effectiveness of the many routing schemes developed by the research community in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we showcase the Secure Opportunistic Schemes (SOS) middleware which allows different routing schemes to be easily implemented relieving the burden of security and connection establishment. The feasibility of creating a delay tolerant social network is…
This report deals with security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in network layer. Multiple secure routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, they often use the cryptography to secure routing functionalities. The cryptography alone is not enough to defend against multiple attacks due to the node compromise. Therefore, we need more algorithmic solutions. In this report, we focus on the behavior of routing protocols to determine which properties make them more resilient to attacks. Our aim is to find some answers to the following questions. Are there any exist…
The number of mobile and IoT devices connected to home and enterprise networks is growing fast. These devices offer new services and experiences for the users; however, they also present new classes of security threats pertaining to data and device safety and user privacy. In this article, we first analyze the potential threats presented by these devices connected to edge networks. We then propose Securebox: a new cloud-driven, low cost Security-as-a-Service solution that applies Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to improve network monitoring, security and management. Securebox enables remote …
This paper introduces an efficient reactive routing protocol considering the mobility and the reliability of a node in Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks (CRSNs). The proposed protocol accommodates the dynamic behavior of the spectrum availability and selects a stable transmission path from a source node to the destination. Outlined as a weighted graph problem, the proposed protocol measures the weight for an edge the measuring the mobility patterns of the nodes and channel availability. Furthermore, the mobility pattern of a node is defined in the proposed routing protocol from the viewpoint of …
In wireless systems, neighbor discovery (ND) is a fundamental building block: determining which devices are within direct radio communication is an enabler for networking protocols and a wide range of applications. To thwart abuse of ND and the resultant compromise of the dependent functionality of wireless systems, numerous works proposed solutions to secure ND. Nonetheless, until very recently, there has been no formal analysis of secure ND protocols. We close this gap in \cite{asiaccs08}, but we concentrate primarily on the derivation of an impossibility result for a class of protocols. In …
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security lo…
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, CNR（意大利国家研究委员会信息学与电信学研究所）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）
Untile recently crowdsourcing has been primarily conceived as an online activity to harness resources for problem solving. However the emergence of opportunistic networking (ON) has opened up crowdsourcing to the spatial domain. In this paper we bring the ON model for potential crowdsourcing in the smart city environment. We introduce cognitive features to the ON that allow users' mobile devices to become aware of the surrounding physical environment. Specifically, we exploit cognitive psychology studies on dynamic memory structures and cognitive heuristics, i.e. mental models that describe ho…
A core feature of Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is opportunistic content caching in routers. It enables routers to satisfy content requests with in-network cached copies, thereby reducing bandwidth utilization, decreasing congestion, and improving overall content retrieval latency. One major drawback of in-network caching is that content producers have no knowledge about where their content is stored. This is problematic if a producer wishes to delete its content. In this paper, we show how to address this problem with a protocol called BEAD (Best-Effort Autonomous Deletion). BEAD achieves …
Research testbed fabrics have potential to support long-lived, evolving, interdomain experiments, including opt-in application traffic across multiple campuses and edge sites. We propose abstractions and security infrastructure to facilitate multi-domain networking, and a reusable controller toolkit (ExoPlex) for network service providers (NSPs) running in testbed-hosted virtual network slices. We demonstrate the idea on the ExoGENI testbed, which allows slices to interconnect and exchange traffic over peering links by mutual consent. Each ExoPlex NSP runs a peering controller that manages its…
Current handoffs are not designed to achieve multiple desirable features simultaneously. This weakness has resulted in handoff schemes that are seamless but not adaptive, or adaptive but not secure, or secure but not autonomous, or autonomous but not correct, etc. To face this limitation, we initiated a research project to develop a new kind of handoff system which attains multiple purposes simultaneously by using context information from the external and internal handoff environment. We envision a cognitive handoff as a multipurpose, multi-criteria, environment-aware, and policy-based handoff…
The rapid involution of the mobile generation with incipient data networking capabilities and utilization has exponentially increased the data traffic volumes. Such traffic drains various key issues in 5G mobile backhaul networks. Security of mobile backhaul is of utmost importance; however, there are a limited number of articles, which have explored such a requirement. This paper discusses the potential design issues and key challenges of the secure 5G mobile backhaul architecture. The comparisons of the existing state-of-the-art solutions for secure mobile backhaul, together with their major…
Given the success of IoT platforms, more developers and companies want to include the technology in their portfolio. However, in the case of single board microcontrollers, the support for networking operations is not ideal, and different IoT platforms allow access to the networking submodule via different libraries and system calls, leading to a steeper learning curve. Code generators for API clients can enhance productivity, but they tend to generate universal purpose code, and on the other hand the networking primitives of IoT devices are platform specific, especially when security mechanism…
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a novel architectural model for cloud network infrastructure, improving resource utilization, scalability and administration. SDN deployments increasingly rely on virtual switches executing on commodity operating systems with large code bases, which are prime targets for adversaries attacking the net- work infrastructure. We describe and implement TruSDN, a framework for bootstrapping trust in SDN infrastructure using Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), allowing to securely deploy SDN components and protect communication between network endpoints. We int…
The growth in data traffic and the increased demand for quality of service had generated a large demand for network systems to be more efficient. The introduction of improved routing systems to meet the increasing demand and varied protocols to accommodate various scales of challenges in network efficiency had further complicated the operations. This means that a better mode of intelligence has to be infused into networking for smoother operations and better autonomic features. Cognitive networks are defined and analyzed in this angle. They are identified to have the potential to deal with the…
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an internetworking paradigm that offers an alternative to the current IP\nobreakdash-based Internet architecture. ICN's most distinguishing feature is its emphasis on information (content) instead of communication endpoints. One important open issue in ICN is whether negative acknowledgments (NACKs) at the network layer are useful for notifying downstream nodes about forwarding failures, or requests for incorrect or non-existent information. In benign settings, NACKs are beneficial for ICN architectures, such as CCNx and NDN, since they flush state in ro…
This article presents a distributed solution to autonomous quality of service provision in cognitive radio networks. Specifically, cognitive STDMA and CDMA communication networks are studied. Based on asynchronous weak commitment search the task of QoS provision is distributed among different network nodes. Simulation results verify this scheme converges very fast to optimal solution, which makes it suitable for practical real time systems. This application of artificial intelligence in wireless and mobile communications can be used in home automation and networking, and vehicular technology. …
Smart city projects address many of the current problems afflicting high populated areas and cities and, as such, are a target for government, institutions and private organizations that plan to explore its foreseen advantages. In technical terms, smart city projects present a complex set of requirements including a large number users with highly different and heterogeneous requirements. In this scenario, this paper proposes and analyses the impact and perspectives on adopting software-defined networking and artificial intelligence as innovative approaches for smart city project development an…
Enhancing Resilience for IoE: A Perspective of Networking-Level Safeguard
Department of Electrical Engineering（电子工程系）；Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica（学术院信息科学研究所）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence Innovation（人工智能创新研究所）；Department of Information Management（信息管理系）
Growing traffic demands and increasing security awareness are driving the need for secure services. Current solutions require manual configuration and deployment based on the customer's requirements. In this work, we present an architecture for an automatic intent-based provisioning of a secure service in a multilayer - IP, Ethernet, and optical - network while choosing the appropriate encryption layer using an open-source software-defined networking (SDN) orchestrator. The approach is experimentally evaluated in a testbed with commercial equipment. Results indicate that the processing impact …
Denial of service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to threaten the reliability of networking systems. Previous approaches for protecting networks from DoS attacks are reactive in that they wait for an attack to be launched before taking appropriate measures to protect the network. This leaves the door open for other attacks that use more sophisticated methods to mask their traffic. A secure overlay services (SOS) architecture has been proposed to provide reliable communication between clients and a target under DoS attacks. The SOS architecture employs a set of o…
Future practical implementation of secure quantum communication technology in a multiuser network environment would require automatic monitoring of the optical link condition and quantum system parameters, along with adjusting them in real time according to protocol restrictions. We demonstrate how software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm can be used for addressing this problem on the example of a subcarrier wave quantum communication system, which is promising for network applications. We propose a novel approach to dynamic quantum network routing and communication security based on SDN Ope…
With the fast expanding scale of vehicular networks, vehicular edge computing (VEC) has emerged and attracted growing attention from both industry and academia. Parked vehicles (PVs) have great potential to join vehicular networks for sharing their idle computing and networking resources. However, due to the underlying security and privacy threats, it is challenging to fairly motivate PVs for resource sharing in an efficient and secure way. In this paper, we propose a permissioned vehicular blockchain for secure and efficient resource sharing in VEC, namely, Parkingchain. We first design smart…
The existing characteristics of the wireless networks nowadays, urgently impose the exploitation of flexible networking solutions that will offer increased efficiency in resource utilization and application Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning and at the same time will reduce the energy consumption and achieve green targets. In this respect, Operator-governed Opportunistic Networks (ONs), which are dynamically created, temporary, coordinated extensions of the infrastructure, are the basic constituents in the proposed approach. In addition, Cognitive Management Systems (CMSs), which comprise s…
Maintaining a resilient computer network is a delicate task with conflicting priorities. Flows should be served while controlling risk due to attackers. Upon publication of a vulnerability, administrators scramble to manually mitigate risk while waiting for a patch. We introduce FASHION: a linear optimizer that balances routing flows with the security risk posed by these flows. FASHION formalizes routing as a multi-commodity flow problem with side constraints. FASHION formulates security using two approximations of risk in a probabilistic attack graph (Frigault et al., Network Security Metrics…
Among civilian communication systems, vehicular networks emerge as one of the most is convincing and yet most challenging instantiations of the mobile ad hoc networking technology. Towards the deployment of vehicular communication systems, security and privacy are critical factors and significant challenges to be met. This Vehicular communication (VC) system has the potential to improve road safety and driving comfort. Nevertheless, securing the operation is a prerequisite for deployment so in this paper we are focusing on real time experimental design of infrastructure to vehicle communicatio…
In 5G networks, the number of connected devices, data rate and data volume per area, as well as the variety of QoS requirements, will attain unprecedented scales. The achievement of these goals will rely on new technologies and disruptive changes in network architecture and node design. Energy efficiency is believed to play a key role in complementing the 5G technologies and optimizing their deployment, dynamic configuration and management [1]. Within the framework of green communications and networks, especially for next-generation green cellular radio access networks, the GREAT (Green Cognit…
Spectrum is a scarce commodity, and considering the spectrum scarcity faced by the wireless-based service providers led to high congestion levels. Technical inefficiencies from pooled spectrum (this is nothing but the "common carrier principle" adopted in oil/gas/electricity pipelines/networks.), since all ad hoc networks share a common pool of channels, exhausting the available channels will force ad hoc networks to block the services. Researchers found that cognitive radio (CR) technology may resolve the spectrum scarcity. CR network proved to next generation wireless communication system th…
Multicasting is a fundamental networking primitive utilized by numerous applications. This also holds true for cognitive radio networks (CRNs) which have been proposed as a solution to the problems that emanate from the static non-adaptive features of classical wireless networks. A prime application of CRNs is dynamic spectrum access (DSA), which improves the efficiency of spectrum allocation by allowing a secondary network, comprising of secondary users (SUs), to share spectrum licensed to a primary licensed networks comprising of primary users (PUs). Multicasting in CRNs is a challenging pro…
