Friend or Foe: Mitigating Insider Threats in Scalable Distributed Systems

Cristina Nita-Rotaru,
Purdue University
4pm Wed, 16 March, 2005
SC 3405

Geographically distributed systems provide support for numerous activities including personal, commercial and international financial transactions, studying and teaching, shopping for goods or managing modern battlefields. Such systems provide instant information access by replicating the state in every geographical site. Additionally, they are expected to provide secure and uninterrupted service within acceptable throughput and latency parameters. 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, creating opportunities for attacks coming from inside the system.

Current architectures for distributed systems tolerating insider threats have strong connectivity requirements and use multiple all-peer communication exchanges that prevent them from scaling to wide-area networks. In this talk we introduce an hierarchical approach which combines intrusion-tolerant protocols with fault-tolerant protocols to achieve scalable intrusion-tolerant systems. In addition, we present some initial thoughts about how to cope with attacks from malicious, but authenticated, clients that inject deceptive data in the system in order to mislead correct clients.

This project is joint work with Yair Amir, Johns Hopkins University and is funded by the Self-Regenerative Systems DARPA Program.

Speaker Bio:

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 : 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.

More information available at http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/crisn/ http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/crisn/lab/index.html