IU security experts receive $910,000

The Department of Defense awarded $910,000 to a team of computer security experts at IU to study issues and vulnerabilities associated with software-defined networking, according to a press release.

Google and Facebook are only two of several companies using software-defined networks. In the case of Google and Facebook, the network protocol is OpenFlow.

L. Jean Camp, a professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing, will lead the team. Marin Swany, an associate professor of computer science and director of IU’s Indiana Center for Network Translational Research and Education, and Christopher Small, a network researcher at InCNTRE, are other team members.

IU opened a software-defined networking laboratory at InCNTRE in 2011 to study how well OpenFlow products and software-defined networking products from different vendors work together, according to the release. The lab at InCNTRE is currently the largest test bed for software-defined networking in the world.

“Google uses SDN networks for its data centers,” Camp said in the release. “Their physical networks are secure, and everyone in the organization is trusted. But like the Internet in the 1980s, the lack of technical security is a result of the organizational and economic environment, so avoiding the same vulnerabilities and trust failures that occur now in the current Internet for future software-defined internet connections require understanding the security now.”

SDN provides network administrators control over network traffic without physical access to the network’s hardware, according to the release.

“Next-generation networking will utilize software as much as hardware and these resulting software-defined networks will have incredible potential,” Camp said in the release. “They can make networks more secure, more reliable and more manageable. However, if the security in these networks is not done well, attackers will take advantage of the same potential. That is, attacks could be more affordable, more reliable and easier to manage.”

One of the primary charges of the work will be to identify and illustrate the resolution of security that would be essential to realizing the full potential for SDN, according to the release. Using an OpenFlow network, the IU team will conduct threat modeling related to OpenFlow protocols such as device authentication to individual devices such as switches and controllers and to multi-controller environments or the system as a whole, according to the release.

-Makenzie Holland