Network Infrastructure Security & Robustness: ongoing challenge for researchers and practitioners
Dr. Rav Yavatkar
Intel Fellow, Intel Corporate Technology Group Director,
Systems Technology Lab, INTEL CORPORATION
Abstract
Network infrastructures continue to be plagued by an increasing array of network-borne threats. Attackers have grown ever more sophisticated in their ability to hide the presence of attacks from the networks, systems, and tools designed to defend against them. The value of stealthy spyware, root kits, and system bots have become an attractive source of financial gain for an increasingly organized and malicious community of attackers. As a result, security and robustness must be pervasive attributes of a distributed infrastructure.
Getting ahead of attackers requires improving local integrity assurance and communicating integrity measurements to support network-wide transparency, correlation, and automated response mechanisms. A generalized, measurement-based approach must be applied both at a system level as well as across an infrastructure. Local platform integrity rests on a foundation of low-level measurement and local systemic correlation. Enhancements in hardware architectures provide higher assurance mechanisms to provide operating system independent integrity measurement of critical platform components. A multi-tier correlation model starting on the local platform can support scalable communication of measurement data to broader distributed tiers of network-wide correlation. Improving the scalability of multi-tier correlation depends on probabilistic models to reduce resource demands while maintaining low false positive-rates. This talk will describe the research challenges, survey the current work, and discuss some promising directions.
Dr. Raj Yavatkar is an Intel Fellow and Director of the
Systems Technology Lab in the Corporate Technology Group.
Yavatkar joined Intel in 1995 and leads advanced R&D in
the areas of system architecture and platform technologies
including autonomics,
virtualization, low-power Intel Architecture, and platform
physicals.
Previously, Yavatkar was the Chief Software Architect for
Intel's IXP family of network processors. Earlier, he also
led Intel's advanced research and development activities
in internet
quality of service and programmable networks and designed
a framework
for policy-based network management that led to development
of an industry-wide
technical standard. He was a key player in the initial
development of Intel's communications building block strategy
that
led to the formation of the Intel Communications Group.
Yavatkar received his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue
University in 1989 and holds eight patents, with more than
25 pending. He is recognized as a leading expert in the networking
industry,
serves on the editorial board of IEEE Networks Magazine,
and was the General Chair of ACM Sigcomm 2004. Yavatkar has
published
more than 30 papers in academic journals and conferences,
and has co-authored
the book, "Inside
the Internet's Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP)." He
serves on the editorial board of the IEEE Network magazine
and, until recently, he was the vice-chairman of the Network
Processing
Forum, which develops standards for the network processing
industry. |
