An Open Infrastructure for Network Performance and Security Monitoring

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

The project plans to solve two important network problems facing distributed computation and Grids. The first problem is to provide a sufficiently flexible and robust framework for authentication and authorization, and the second problem is to provide secure mechanisms to allow researchers to upload new or enhanced measurement tools in a secure and trustworthy fashion. Building on the National Internet Measurement Infrastructure (NIMI), the project plans to evolve NIMI to a truly large scale implementation. Work involves migrating messaging, authentication and authorization to commonly used components, and mitigating some of the security problems associated with uploading measurement tools by building fine-grained delegation support and different levels of security. These structures can be used for various forms of distributed passive monitoring and security monitoring such as intrusion detection systems. The NIMI architecture will be extended to support open large-scale grid technologies. The overall vision is to encourage researchers, especially grid-proejcts, to build clients which will interact with the NIMI infrastructure. The infrastructure can then be used for secure, flexible command and control mechanisms, and also be sued for distributed passive monitoring.