Re-Inventing the Internet: Building Security In

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Re-Inventing the InternetBuilding Security In

• CISE
• National Science Foundationdlfisher_at_nsf.gov

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Executive Summary

• The current Internet is unreliable and vulnerable
  to attack.
• Many of these vulnerabilities are inherently in
  design choices of the architecture
• Yet critical infrastructures depend upon it.
• We need to re-invent the Internet.
• This time we need to design-in security,
  robustness, flexibility, manageability,
  evolvability, and

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Internet Vulnerability and the Need to Re-invent
the Internet

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2005 PITAC Report on CyberSecurity

• Because much of this (IT) infrastructure
  connects one way or another to the Internet, it
  embodies the Internets original structural
  attributes of openness, inventiveness, and the
  assumption of good will.
• These signature attributes have made the U.S. IT
  infrastructure an irresistible target for vandals
  and criminals worldwide
• A broad consensus among computer scientists is
  emerging that the approach of patching and
  retrofitting networks, computing systems, and
  software to add security and reliability may be
  necessary in the short run but is inadequate for
  addressing the Nations cyber security needs.
• 
  

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Not a new problem

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1987 An Agenda for Research in Networking and
Communications (NSF)

• It is vital to devote much more research, both
  at the academic level and at the industrial
  level, to these survivability problems before a
  truly major catastrophe occurs.

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1988 Toward a Network Research Network (NRC)

• Privacy and security are issues that are
  especially important to consider early on
  privacy and security in data communications have
  been underappreciated and underprotected to date

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1991 Computers at Risk Safe Computing in the
Information Age (NRC)

• we cannot wait to see what a attackers may
  devise, or what accident may happen, before we
  start our defense. We must develop a long-term
  plan, based on our predictions of the future, and
  start now to develop systems that will provide
  adequate security and trustworthiness over the
  next decades.

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1997 Critical Foundations Protecting Americas
Infrastructures(Presidents Commission on
Critical Infrastructure Protection)

• The rapid proliferation and integration of
  telecommunications and computer systems have
  connected infrastructure to one another in a
  complex network of interdependence. This
  interlinkage has created a new dimension of
  vulnerability, which, when combined with an
  emerging constellation of threats, poses
  unprecedented national threat.
• Potential cyber threats and associated risks
  range from recreational hackers to terrorists to
  national teams of information warfare
  specialists.
• .

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Not just technology

• Economics
• Privacy
• Personal information and Identity theft
• Surveillance (sensors cameras web activity,
  location)
• Open society
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of access
• Reachability

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IEEE Spectrum June 2005

• If censorship technology flourishes in China, it
  will be easier and cheaper to take root
  elsewhere.
• The features that China wants installed in
  intermediating devices and software will
  gradually find their way into all of the
  suppliers products, if only because it is
  cheaper that way.
• The primary and most longstanding means of
  blocking is at the router level.

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What should we do?

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1999 Trust in Cyberspace (NRC)

• Recommendation
• It is time to challenge the paradigm of
  absolute security and move toward a model built
  on three axioms of insecurity insecurity exists
  insecurity cannot be destroyed and insecurity
  can be moved around.
• Trustworthiness from untrusted components is a
  research area that deserves greater attention.

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2003 Grand Research Challenges in Information
Systems (CRA)

• Create Systems you can count on
• System development tools that reduce the
  frequency and severity of bugs.
• System administration tools that reduce the
  frequency and severity of configuration errors.
• Understandable, deployable, and usable security.
• New approaches to composition of modular
  elements.
• New approaches to federation.
• Pervasive audit trails.
• Self-adaptive systems.
• Architectural enhancements to processors (trusted
  HW)

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2005 Overcoming Barriers to Disruptive
Innovation in Networking, (NSF)

• in the thirty-odd years since its invention,
  new uses and abuses, along with the realities
  that come with being a fully commercial
  enterprise, are pushing the Internet into realms
  that its original design neither anticipated nor
  easily accommodates.
• Such problems are numerous, and the Internets
  emerging centrality has made these flaws all the
  more evident and urgent. As a result, it is now
  widely believed that the Internet architecture is
  in need of substantial change.

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2001 Looking over the Fence at Networks (NRC)
successful and widely adopted technologies are
subject to ossification, which makes it is hard
to introduce new capabilities or, if the current
technology has run its course, to replace it with
something better. Existing industry players are
not generally motivated to develop and deploy
disruptive technologies
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2001 Looking over the Fence at Networks (NRC)

• Networking research should more aggressively
  seek to develop new ideas and approaches.
• To encourage thinking that is unconstrained by
  the current Internet, Plan B approaches should
  be pursued that begin with a clean slate and only
  later (if warranted) consider migration from
  current technology.

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NeTS Planning Activities

• Planning Grants FY04
• Disruptive network innovations via network
  virtualization
• Optical integration and implications on optical
  networking
• Planning Grants FY05
• Clean-slate network security
• End to end network architecture
• Wireless mobile and sensor networks
• Distributed systems
• Real time networked systems and CIP

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Purpose of Planning Grants

• Articulate a compelling research agenda
• Articulate requirements for an experimental
  infrastructure
• Get communities to work together
• Network architects and security experts
• Network architects and optical integration
  experts
• Help NSF other agencies to fund and promote
  agenda

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2006 NSF NeTS Research Agenda

• Rethink/Reinvent the Internet
• Keep the good, address limitations, create new
• Clean-slate architecture
• Include optical, wireless, sensor network, etc.
  technologies
• Enable new applications
• Build-in attributes of security, robustness,
  scalability, manageability, evolvability, etc.
• Work together for a synergistic approach
• Security, network architecture, realtime experts
  

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Potential Outcomes of Initiative

• Migrate functionality into Current Internet
• Enable an Alterative Secure Internet for Critical
  Infrastructures
• Replace of Internet under Catastrophic Failure

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Your Role

• Discuss how to build-in security into a clean
  slate architecture
• Write a report
• Research Agenda
• Infrastructure Needs
• Engage in joint research with networking and
  security researchers