CAREER: Programmable In-network Security

Attacks on the Internet cost the economy billions of dollars. While today’s Internet was developed to provide widespread connectivity to individuals and businesses across the world, the networks that support the Internet do not have built-in security mechanisms. This project is focused on solving that problem by investigating future network designs based on new network technology that would support security and provide defense across a wide variety of attacks. The project vision is to develop Programmable In-network Security, or ‘Poise’. Poise aims to design and integrate a wide range of defenses directly inside the network, leveraging the technology trend of network programmability. If successful, a Poise network would support security as naturally as today’s networks support connectivity. This project will develop new scientific foundations for network security, investigate practical use cases, release open-source tools, and produce educational materials. The potential impact of Poise is to make future networks fundamentally more secure than they are today. This project presents a vision of Programmable In-network Security, or ‘Poise’, informed by the recent trend that network devices are becoming increasingly programmable, and with a goal of supporting security as a first-class network attribute. The project plans to take a three-pronged approach to realizing this goal. First, Poise aims to transform a programmable switch into a defense platform by designing a wide range of security applications that reside in the switch. Second, Poise aims to transform a network of programmable switches into a defense fleet, by architecting defense applications into the network paths and synchronizing them for whole-network defense. Third, Poise seeks to ensure that the defense applications, individually and collectively, are themselves secure against attacks. In its ultimate embodiment, a Poise network would toggle a wide array of defenses rapidly on and off as traffic flows through, mitigating attacks in real time. This project will advance the state of the art in network security in the above three dimensions and will produce scientific foundations and reusable system prototypes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.