CS 395/495 Internet Security: a Measurement-based Approach

Instructor

Yan Chen, Assistant Professor
Room 330, 1890 Maple Ave., 491-4946. ychen@cs.northwestern.edu
Office Hours: Wed. 2-4pm, Rm 330, 1890 Maple Ave.

Teaching Assistant

Jason A. Skicewicz
jskitz@cs.northwestern.edu
Office Hours: Tu. and Th. 3:30pm - 4:30pm, Rm 321, 1890 Maple Ave.

Location and Time

· Lectures: Tuesday and Thursday 2-3:20pm, Room 342, 1890 Maple.

Course Description

The evolution of Internet has spawned rich complexity and vulnerability in its infrastructure. In this course, we will take a measurement-based approach to understand the complexity of the Internet, i.e., characterize, understand, and model the enormous volume and great variety of Internet traffic in terms of large-scale behaviors. Based on that, we will investigate the vulnerability of the Internet when different services have evolved and innovated in different and competing ways, with increasingly less global consensus.

We will start with the basic concepts of security, cryptography, authentication and integrity, and then focus on security challenges of network and distributed systems as well as the counter-attack approaches. In the first half of the course, we will study large-scale Internet attacks. Topics include the characterization, technologies, history and current defense of mobile malcode (virus/worm), denial of service (DoS) attacks, firewall technologies, intrusion detection systems (IDS), testbed and benchmark for security. While lots of existing attacks can be discovered by their signatures, there are still many unknown, new attacks, and traffic anomalies. In the second part of the class we examine these anomalies through investigating high-speed network measurement and monitoring, network fault diagnostics and root cause analysis, BGP/routing anomalies, network topology discovery, measurement-based inference, and overlay and peer-to-peer system monitoring.

During the course, we will read and discuss research papers, and identify a list of open research problems, from which the students can choose their class projects. In addition to deploying end-to-end measurement on global network testbed, PlanetLab (http://www.planet-lab.org/), massive real-world anonymized router/gateway traffic data will be obtained to analyze the reliability/vulnerability of the Internet and to detect both well-known and unknown virus/worm/attacks. We will further characterize and diagnoise the unknown anomalies and network failures.

Course Prerequisites

Required: CS 340 or any equivalent computer network introductory courses.
Highly recommended: CS 213 or equivalent computer systems course.
Highly recommended: CS 343 or equivalent operating systems course.
Highly recommended: UNIX programming experience (gcc, gdb, make, etc.)

Course Materials

There is no required textbook. All reading will be from papers which will be made available online.
Recommended books and references

Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, 2^nd edition, by William R. Cheswick, Steven M. Bellovin, and Aviel D. Rubin
Network Security - Private Communication in a Public World, by Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman and Mike Speciner, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2002
An encyclopedia of DDoS by Dave Dittrich at Univ. of Washington is here.
Lecture Notes on Cryptography, by S. Goldwasser and M. Bellare, available online at http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/mihir/papers/gb.html
Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, [KR], Second Edition, James Kurose and Keith Ross, Addison Wesley, 2002 (Note: buy the hardcover second edition, not the softcover “preliminary edition” or the first edition).

Grading

No exams for this class.

Class participation and discussion 10%
Paper reading summary 10%
In class paper presentation 15%
Project 65%

Proposal and survey 5%
Design document 5%
Weekly report and meeting 5%
Project presentation 25%
Final report 25%

Papers Reading and Presentation

There is no required textbook. All reading will be from papers. Whenever possible, handouts and papers will be placed online on the web page. A schedule of assigned readings is available online.

To ensure lively discussions, you will be required to write a very brief summary of each paper you read, to be electronically handed in to the TA before the beginning of the class when the reading is due. Your summary should include at least:

Paper title and its author(s).
Brief one-line summary.
A paragraph of the one or two most significant new insight(s) you took away from the paper.
A paragraph of the one or two most significant flaw(s) of the paper: maybe an experiment was poorly designed or the main idea had a narrow scope or applicability. Being able to assess weaknesses as well as strengths is an important skill for this course and beyond.
A last paragraph where you state the relevance of the ideas today, potential future research suggested by the article, etc.

We will start each class with an introduction of the basic problems/ideas/solutions (10 minutes), followed by student presentations of the two papers assigned. For each paper, there are 20 minutes for presentation, and 10 minutes for discussion. We will summarize them with the last 10 minutes. Some rules for the paper presentation are available online.

Each presentation should include at least the following from the paper:

Motivation
Classification of related work and background
Main ideas
Evaluation and results
Open issues

You must send the slides to the TA and me for review at least 24 hours before your presentation. There are some guidelines suggested by Prof. Fabián E. Bustamante which you will find useful.

Projects

Projects (done in groups of size 2+) are a critical component of this course. Your goal is to design, build and evaluate interesting systems that address issues, solve problems and exploit techniques from classroom discussions and readings.

Projects must be written up in a term paper and teams will present their results at the end of the course in a mini-conference and write up a report. The list of potential ideas for projects will be posted soon. Feel free to use one, propose something completely different, or refine one of these into your own idea.

Project Deliverables and Deadlines

Proposal – April 8: 3-4 pages describing the purpose of the project, work to be done and potential load distribution, expected outcome/results, etc. Make sure to describe the context and related work for the proposed project. You should have another 1-2 pages references.

Design Document – April 15: 4-5 pages with a detailed description of the software design, load distribution among group members. Construct a detailed sketch of your evaluation plan - what hypothesis is to be tested, how you will control the test circumstances, what workloads will you apply, why will this test enable resolution of the hypothesis, and what and how will specific metrics be measured.

Weekly Meeting and Progress Report – 4/13-5/25: Each team will schedule a weekly meeting (30 minutes) with me. A work-in-progress report (except the 4/13 week) of 1-2 pages on the project status, initial results, and problems encountered, etc. is due 24 hours ahead of the meeting.

Project Presentation – June 1 and 3: Present the results in class, including Q&A.

Final Report – June 9: The final report is a workshop-level paper describing your work, evaluation, related research, potential avenues to explore, etc. You should incorporate the comments received during the presentation. Code should be submitted electronically.

Communication

Course web site: http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~ychen/classes/cs495/. Check it out regularly for schedule changes, clarifications and corrections to assignments, and other course-related announcements.
Email list and newsgroup (cs.netsec) will be available for announcement, and posting questions and answers.

Policies

Late policy:
Since there are many small handin (e.g., paper summary, work-in-progress report) for this course, we do not accept late submissions.
Work division:
I will try to group undergrad and grad students together. While more work is certainly expected for the grad students, undergraduate students should also be responsible for significant portion of the project and each undergrad in the team should do similar amount of work. At the end of the quarter, we will ask each one to submit a brief description on work division of his/her team.

Tentative Schedules

Notes: Reading refers to textbook KR unless denoted otherwise.

Date	Lectures Topics	Notes	Reading
Tu 3/30	Class overview, Introduction to networking security (cryptography, authentication)	[ppt][pdf]	KR 7.1 - 7.3
Th 4/1	Introduction to networking security (authentication, integrity, access control)	[ppt][pdf]	KR 7.3 – 7.5
Tu 4/6	Mobile malcode: terminology, anatomy, and defense	[ppt][pdf]	1. The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis, Eugene H. Spafford, Purdue Technical Report CSD-TR-823, 1988. 2. A Taxonomy of Computer Worms, N. Weaver, V. Paxson, S. Staniford, and R. Cunningham, the First Workshop on Rapid Malcode (WORM), 2003.
Th 4/8	Viruses and worms: history and current defense postures	[ppt][pdf]	1. How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time, S. Staniford, V. Parxson and N. Weaver. In Proceedings of the 11th Usenix Security Symposium, 2002. 2. Large Scale Malicious Code: A Research Agenda, N. Weaver, V. Paxson, S. Staniford and R. Cunningham, DARPA-sponsored report, 2003.
Tu 4/13	Advances in malcode technology	[ppt][pdf]	1. The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm. D. Moore, V. Paxson, S. Savage, C. Shannon, S. Staniford, N. Weaver, 2003 2. Internet Quarantine: Requirements for Containing Self-Propagating Code. D. Moore, C. Shannon, G. Voelker and S. Savage. In Proceedings of the IEEE Infocom, 2003.
Th 4/15	Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks	[ppt][pdf]	1. A Taxonomy of DDoS Attacks and Defense Mechanisms, J. Mirkovic and P. Reiher, in ACM Computer and Communication Review (CCR), Apr. 2004. 2. Inferring Internet Denial of Service Activity, D. Moore, G. Voelker and Stefan Savage, in Proc. of the USENIX Security Symposium, 2001.
Tu 4/20	DoS attacks (cont’d)	[ppt][pdf]	1. Flash Crowds and Denial of Service Attacks: Characterization and Implications for CDNs and Web Sites (PS version), J. Jung, B. Krishnamurthy and M. Rabinovich, in Proc. of WWW, 2002. 2. Low-Rate TCP-Targeted Denial of Service Attacks. (The Shrew vs. the Mice and Elephants), A. Kuzmanovic and E. W. Knightly, in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM, 2003.
Th 4/22	Firewalls	[ppt][pdf]	1. Firewall Gateways, Chapter 3 of “Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker”, (version 1 is online here), W. Cheswick and S. Bellovin.
Tu 4/27	Intrusion Detection system (IDS): survey and taxonomy	[ppt][pdf]	1. Towards a Taxonomy of Intrusion Detection Systems and Attacks, D. Alessandri and many others. IBM research report 2001 2. Intrusion Detection Systems, Rebecca Bace and Peter Mell, NIST report.
Th 4/29	Host-based vs. network-based IDS	[ppt][pdf]	1. Network Intrusion Detection. B. Mukherjee, L. T. Heberlein, and K. N. Levitt. IEEE Network, May/June, 1994 2. Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real-Time, V. Paxson, Computer Networks, 31(23-24). December, 1999.
Tu 5/4	IDS benchmark and Worm Detection	[ppt][pdf]	1. The Use of Honeynets to Detect Exploited Systems Across Large Enterprise Networks, J. Levine, R. L, H. Owen, D. Contis, and B. Culver, in Proc. of Workshop on Information Assurance, 2003. An interesting extended work-in-progress is Wormholes and a Honeyfarm (PPT), N. Weaver, V. Paxson, and S. Staniford, DIMACS Workshop on Large-Scale Internet Attacks, 2003. 2. Benchmarking Anomaly-Based Detection Systems. R. Maxion and K. M. C Tan. In Proc. of the 1st International Conference on Dependable Systems & Networks. 2000.
Th 5/6	Signature- vs. statistics-based NIDS and anomaly detection	[ppt][pdf]	1. Insertion, Evasion, and Denial of Service: Eluding Network Intrusion Detection. T. H. Ptacek and T. N. Newsham. Technical Report. 1998. 2. Anomaly Detection in IP Networks, by M. Thottan and C. Ji, IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, Aug. 2003
Tu 5/11	High-speed network monitoring	[ppt][pdf]	1. Automatically Inferring Patterns of Resource Consumption in Network Traffic, C. Estan, S. Savage and G. Varghese, in ACM SIGCOMM, 2003. Paper in (PostScript) and (PDF). Slides in XP PowerPoint. 2. New Directions in Traffic Measurement and Accounting, C. Estan and G. Varghese, in ACM SIGCOMM, 2002. Paper in (PostScript) and (PDF). Slides (PowerPoint)
Th 5/13	High-speed network anomaly detection	[ppt][pdf]	1. Sketch-based Change Detection: Methods, Evaluation, and Applications, B. Krishnamurthy, S. Sen, Y. Zhang, and Y. Chen, in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2003. 2. A Signal Analysis of Network Traffic Anomalies, P. Barford, J. Kline, D. Plonka and Amos Ron, in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW), 2003. (slides in PDF).
Tu 5/18	BGP/routing anomalies and attacks	[ppt][pdf]	1. Delayed Internet Routing Convergence, by C. Labovitz, A. Ahuja, A. Bose and F. Jahanian, in ACM SIGCOMM 2000. 2. Generic Threats to Routing Protocols, A. Barbir, S. Murphy and Y. Yang, draft-ietf-rpsec-routing-threats-04, Dec. 2003.
Th 5/20	Network fault diagnostics	[ppt][pdf]	1. User-level Internet Path Diagnosis,R. Mahajan, N. Spring, D. Wetherall and T. Anderson, in Proc. of ACM SOSP 2003. 2. Server-based Inference of Internet Performance.V. N. Padmanabhan, L. Qiu, and H. Wang, in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2003.
Tu 5/25	Network topology discovery	[ppt][pdf]	1. Heuristics for Internet Map Discovery, R. Govindan, and H. Tangmunarunkit, in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2000 (slides). 2. Measuring ISP Topologies with Rocketfuel, N. Spring, R. Mahajan, and D. Wetherall, in ACM SIGCOMM 2002 (talk).
Th 5/27	Overlay and P2P network measurement/monitoring	[ppt][pdf]	1. Resilient Overlay Networks, D. G. Andersen, H. Balakrishnan, M. F. Kaashoek, and R. Morris, in Proc. of ACM SOSP, 2001 (talk). 2. Tomography-based Overlay Network Monitoring, Y. Chen, D. Bindel, and R. H. Katz, in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2003 (talk). Full version is technical report UCB//CSD-03-1252.
Tu 6/1	Project presentation
Th 6/3	Project presentation