MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Some Topics in High-Speed Network Security

Dr. Muriel Medard
MIT Lincoln Labaratory

Monday, March 30, 1998
2:00 PM (refreshments 1:45)
Grier Room, Room 34-101A
EECS Special Seminar

Abstract

The talk covers several topics in network security. We give an overview of some topics: denial of service attacks, attack detection, localization and recovery. We then concentrate on attack vulnerabilities and recovery. In the first part of the talk, we address denial-of-service vulnerabilities, such as correlated jamming. We present a new type of correlated jamming channel which models in-fiber jamming and derive capacity results for it. We relate these results to existing results on correlated jamming.

In the second part of the talk, we present a tree-based redundancy scheme for mesh networks. Trees are an increasingly important form of routing, owing to the rise in multicast (point-to-multipoint) and incast (multipoint-to-point) communications. We give an overview of restoration of service in networks and of restoration for tree-based routes in particular. We present a way of building two redundant trees over any edge/node redundant network, i.e., any network which remains connected after the elimination of any single edge/node. The redundant trees are such that the failure of any edge/node leaves every node connected to at least one of the trees, while allowing the trees to share edges. We discuss the advantages of this scheme over existing redundancy and recovery schemes.