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Design of a secure packet processor

Published: 25 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Programmability in the data path of routers provides the basis for modern router implementations that can adapt to new functional requirements. This programmability is typically achieved through software-programmable packet processing systems. One key concern with the proliferation of these programmable devices throughout the Internet is the potential impact of software vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely. We present a design and proof-of-concept implementation of a packet processing system that uses two security techniques to defend against potential attacks: a processing monitor is used to track operations on each processor core to detect attacks at the processing instruction level; an I/O monitor is used to track operations of the router to detect attacks at the protocol level. Our prototype implementation on the NetFPGA system shows that these monitors can be implemented to operate at high data rates and with little additional hardware resources.

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  • (2017)Real-time attack and failure detection for next generation networks2017 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC)10.1109/ICCNC.2017.7876125(189-193)Online publication date: Jan-2017
  • (2016)Dynamic Hardware Monitors for Network Processor ProtectionIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2015.243575065:3(860-872)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
  • (2016)A novel approach to detect extraneous network traffic from the compromised router2016 3rd International Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology (RAIT)10.1109/RAIT.2016.7507930(352-358)Online publication date: Mar-2016
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ANCS '10: Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems
    October 2010
    244 pages
    ISBN:9781450303798
    DOI:10.1145/1872007
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 25 October 2010

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    View all
    • (2017)Real-time attack and failure detection for next generation networks2017 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC)10.1109/ICCNC.2017.7876125(189-193)Online publication date: Jan-2017
    • (2016)Dynamic Hardware Monitors for Network Processor ProtectionIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2015.243575065:3(860-872)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
    • (2016)A novel approach to detect extraneous network traffic from the compromised router2016 3rd International Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology (RAIT)10.1109/RAIT.2016.7507930(352-358)Online publication date: Mar-2016
    • (2016)Power monitoring of highly parallel network processors2016 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC)10.1109/ICCNC.2016.7440713(1-5)Online publication date: Feb-2016
    • (2016)Cyber‐Assurance Through Embedded Security for the Internet of ThingsCyber‐Assurance for the Internet of Things10.1002/9781119193784.ch2(101-127)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2016
    • (2016)BibliographyCyber‐Assurance for the Internet of Things10.1002/9781119193784.biblio(433-455)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2016
    • (2013)External monitoring of highly parallel network processors2013 IEEE 14th International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR)10.1109/HPSR.2013.6602312(197-204)Online publication date: Jul-2013
    • (2013)Scalable hardware monitors to protect network processors from data plane attacks2013 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)10.1109/CNS.2013.6682721(314-322)Online publication date: Oct-2013
    • (2012)Securing multi-core multi-threaded packet processorsProceedings of the eighth ACM/IEEE symposium on Architectures for networking and communications systems10.1145/2396556.2396591(149-150)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2012
    • (2012)Attacks and Defenses in the Data Plane of NetworksIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2012.509:6(798-810)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2012
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