CSIS Seminar

CYSE Tenure-Track Faculty Candidate Seminar #4: Measurement Integrity in Network Tomography and Resource Allocation: Attacks and Defenses

Abstract

Network measurement is an essential way to gain the understanding on how well a network operates and allocates its resources. In this talk, two new attack strategies against network measurement and resource allocation will be discussed. The first attack is called measurement integrity attack targeting the network tomography, which is an important tool to estimate link metrics from end-to-end network measurements. Unlike conventional data integrity problems that are usually protected by standard methods (e.g., encryption and authentication), a key challenge associated with measurement integrity attacks is that the facts (e.g., packet transmission/delivery timings) during network measurement cannot be protected by such standard methods, but can be easily manipulated by malicious attackers. The basic idea of this attack is to intentionally delay or drop packets at malicious nodes to manipulate end-to-end measurements in a way such that a legitimate node is incorrectly identified by network tomography as the root cause of the problem, thereby becoming a scapegoat. The second attack is the Learning-Evaluation-Beating attack against the resource allocation in the cooperative spectrum sensing system. Based on the black-box nature of the fusion center in cooperative spectrum sensing, our new perspective is to make the adversarial use of machine learning to construct a surrogate model of the fusion center’s decision model. We propose a generic algorithm to create malicious sensing measurements using this surrogate model. The defenses against the two types of attacks will also be discussed. Zoom Link: https://gmu.zoom.us/j/96242010304

Speaker Bio

Shangqing Zhao is currently a Ph.D. candidate of Systems and Security in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Florida Center for Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida. In his Ph. D. study, his research primarily focuses on the network and mobile system design and security. His research results have been published in top-tier conferences (e.g., MobiCom, NSDI, INFOCOM, CCS, ICDCS) and journals (e.g., IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications). He also served as a reviewer for multiple top academic journals and conferences. He is a student member of IEEE and ACM.