SECURITY SEMINAR AND SPECIAL CSL SEMINAR

 

SPEAKER:      Cristina Nita-Rotaru

               Purdue University

 

TITLE:        Insider Threads to Distributed Systems and Network Protocols:

               Challenges and Solutions

 

DATE:         Friday, May 13, 2005

 

TIME:         10:00 AM

 

PLACE:        301 CSL

 

 

ABSTRACT

 

Numerous  applications rely on distributed systems and network protocols,

expecting them to provide secure and uninterrupted service within acceptable

throughput and latency parameters. However, this is difficult to guarantee

in a complex network environment that is susceptible to a multitude of human

and/or electronic threats, especially, as computers can  get so easily

compromised. Any compromised computer gives to an attacker access to all

cryptographic keys stored on that computer and the opportunity to attack the

system from inside.

 

In this talk we show why although necessary, cryptographic techniques such

as data integrity, authentication and confidentiality are not enough to

defend against insider attacks that distributed systems and network

protocols are exposed too. In addition, we propose some solutions and

discuss their limitations.

 

In the first part of the talk we focus on showing why current architectures

for distributed systems tolerating insider threats have limited scalability

to wide-area networks and introduce an hierarchical approach which achieves

improved scalability by combining  intrusion-tolerant protocols with fault-

tolerant protocols.

 

In the second part of the talk we use wireless routing as an example to

demonstrate the vulnerability of multi-hop network protocols to insider

threats. We present several solutions that take advantage of the network

environments, and simulations that show the effectiveness of our mitigation

techniques.

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

Cristina Nita-Rotaru is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer

Sciences and a member of CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in

Information Assurance and Security) at Purdue University. She leads the

Dependable and Secure Distributed Systems Laboratory (DS^2).

Her research interests lie in designing distributed systems, network

protocols and applications that are dependable and secure, while maintaining

acceptable levels of performance. Current research focuses on:

     * designing intrusion-tolerant architectures for distributed services

       that scale to wide-area networks

     * investigating survivable services in multi-hop wireless ad hoc

networks

     * providing access control mechanisms for secure group communication

 

Her work is funded by the Center for Education and Research in Information

Security and Assurance (CERIAS), by the Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency (DARPA), and by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Cristina Nita-Rotaru holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins

University and a M Sc. from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania.