CAREER: Personal Virtual Networks

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

Our mobile devices (e.g. cellphones) regularly encounter and connect to multiple networks to maintain seamless communication, enabling the variety of services we increasingly rely on, such as Internet access, text messaging, social media access, and entertainment. However, such ubiquitous network connections raise a number of important concerns. For example, our devices regularly send data over networks they do not fully trust and that are not under our control, which can lead to security vulnerabilities, poor service, and privacy violations. To address these issues, this proposal seeks to develop Personal Virtual Networks, or PVNs, that provide each device with its own network within a network provider that can provide customizable security and privacy. This proposal introduces the idea of ubiquitous PVNs that can be configured to provide privacy, security and performance across untrusted heterogeneous networks. PVNs will allow devices to establish trusted network configurations inside of network providers, define policies for network traffic, and even deploy limited code that interposes on their traffic using a software middlebox environment. By making in-network resources available to devices via a secure and flexible interface, PVNs can enable more secure, flexible, private, and performant network experiences for users. The proposed work will design a new architecture, as well as abstractions and primitives for providing safe, flexible, and portable user-defined network policies. To support deployments in untrusted environments, this project will include the development of new algorithms and network measurements for auditing PVN deployments in untrusted networks, as well as the design of new frameworks that provide provable privacy and security guarantees atop trusted hardware. Last, the proposed work will develop and conduct empirical evaluations of new applications and services that are enabled by PVNs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.