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Dynamic Traffic Driven Architectures and Algorithms for Securing Networks

Subrata Acharya (Pitt/CS)

PhD Dissertation Defense

Friday, August 8, 2008
10:00am - SENSQ 6106 - Eli Lilly Room

Abstract

The continuous growth in the Internet's size, the amount of data traffic, and the complexity of processing this traffic gives rise to new challenges in building high performance network devices. Such an exponential growth coupled with the increasing sophistication of attacks, is placing stringent demands on the performance of networked systems (e.g. Firewalls). These challenges require new designs, architectures and algorithms for the optimization of such systems.

The current or classical security of present day Internet is "static" and "oblivious" to traffic dynamics in the network. Hence, there are tremendous efforts towards the design and development of several techniques and strategies to deal with the above shortcomings. Unfortunately, the current solutions have been successful in addressing some aspects of security. However, as a whole security remains a major issue. This is primarily due to the lack of adaptation and dynamics in the design of such intrusion detection and mitigation systems.

This thesis focuses on the design of architectures and algorithms for the optimization of such network systems, to aid not only adaptive and real-time "packet filtering" but also fast "content based routing (differentiated services)" in today's data-driven networks. The approach proposed involves a unique combination of algorithmic and architectural techniques that aims to outperform all current solutions in terms of adaptation, speed of operation (under attack or heavily loaded conditions), and overall operational cost-effectiveness of such systems. The tools proposed in this thesis also aim to offer the flexibility to include new approaches, and provide the ability to migrate or deploy additional entities for attack detection and defense.

Dissertation Adviser

Dr. Taieb Znati, Department of Computer Science

Committee Members

Prof. Taieb Znati, Department of Computer Science
Prof. Rami Melhem, Department of Computer Science
Prof. Alexandros Labrinidis, Department of Computer Science
Prof. Ehab S. Al-Shaer, Department of Computer Science, Depaul University

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