Research Summaries

Back TCP Countermeasures for the Misconfiguration Adversary

Fiscal Year 2013
Division Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department Computer Science
Investigator(s) Beverly, Robert E.
Sponsor Space & Naval Warfare Systems Center-Atlantic (Navy)
Summary Packet transit in the modern Internet is complicated by a diverse abundance of network devices that introduce undesirable modifications to a packet and its semantics. In particular, modifications by misconfigured or legacy systems can violate protocol specifications and stifle innovations designed to add features and make the network more robust, harming overall network security. We propose the development of a TCP-based integrity check to detect in-network packet header modifications. The security model under which we operate is that of the misconfiguration adversary, a non-malicious system somewhere in the middle of a connection that is corrupting critical packet semantics. Based on this assumption, the technology will need to give a stronger assertion than a checksum, but not need to go as far as proving protection in the face of a capable and motivated adversary. This allows a fresh point of view to the problem and admits new solutions that have the advantage of backwards compatibility with current devices, while still being able to reliably detect modifications caused by the misconfigured adversary. This technology will be developed as an enhancement to a host protocol stack and experiments will be run to evaluate its performance against the primary objectives of reliability and compatibility.
Keywords Data Integrity Misconfiguration Adversary Middleboxes Immutable fields Protocol Header Protection
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal