CAREER: GAIA: A Self-organizing, Self-healing Network Infrastructure

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

Ben Zhao University of California, Santa Barbara 0546216 Abstract The future of Internet-scale applications relies on securely connecting distributed resources such as corporate data centers, video-conferencing sites, and distributed web caches. Unfortunately, today's Internet is extremely inhospitable for distributed applications. New viruses and worms are discovered on a daily basis, and constantly threaten to compromise end hosts by exploiting software and network vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, administrators are in a constant race to secure machines before they are compromised. The objective of this project is to investigate the design and deployment of a self-healing network infrastructure that allows distributed applications to survive in this environment by maintaining availability while resisting attacks from compromised internal hosts and external attackers. The project focuses on both proactively avoiding interactions with suspicious network entities, and reactively detecting and recovering from internal and external attacks. Compared to end-host or protocol based approaches, our approach is unique in trying to maintain long-term application availability despite the assumption that end hosts are insecure and will be continuously attacked and compromised. The PI is building the Gaia infrastructure on top of a structured peer-to-peer overlay and leverage overlay routing for our scalable communication primitive.