Section: Research Program

Axis 3: Building a secure network stack

To evaluate the techniques developed in Axes 1 and 2, we analyze concrete systems developed not only with industry partners, but also within the team. By using our own systems, we can co-evolve best-practices, while externally developed systems provide realistic challenges especially with respect to analyzing obfuscated malware in the hardware or complex vulnerabilities. In this context, Christian Grothoff (ARP Inria) is currently developing a new Internet, which is supposed to be more secure. This introduces interesting challenges both in terms of vulnerability and malware analysis, and hence should be a great opportunity to mix the competences of all the members of the team.

More precisely, this system intends to challenge the idea that network security is an administrative task, where network administrators shield users with passwords, firewalls, intrusion detection systems and policies. Instead, we want to eliminate administrators that have power over user's data, and as such administrators themselves are liabilities, and because a network design that permits administrative intrusion inherently adds vulnerabilities. Instead, the system should ensure secure communication mechanisms without trusted third parties.

Key challenges we work on include (a) improving scalable secure ad-hoc decentralized routing, including key-value lookup, unicast and multicast communication, (b) protecting meta-data in the overlay using advanced decentralized onion routing, (c) a unified public-key infrastructure and identity management solution that is suitable to replace the Web-of-Trust, X.509, DNSSEC and other legacy methods for naming and identifying services, (d) secure synchronous and asynchronous messaging at scale, providing decentralized alternatives to common online social applications and addressing challenges in protocol evolution and compatibility. Finally, we are currently working on GNU Taler, a new secure privacy-preserving payment system where users never have to authenticate. This system in particular can be used as a concrete test case for the methods developed in the team.

To support this research work, we develop a framework named GNUnet. It provides a clear separation into layers, which facilitates testing and verifying the various components. However, we see that often existing formal verification techniques still do not scale to typical subsystems encountered in practice. Our objective is thus to exploit efficient and scalable formal techniques techniques proposed in Axis 1 together with engineering skills in order to guide the validation (message synchronization, data protection, ...) and reach the best compromise. An additional complication is that we need a validation process that not merely covers the software itself, but also all of its dependencies (such as database, cryptographic libraries and networking libraries). For the Taler-specific hardware, we are envisioning an NFC-powered device, which creates new challenges in terms of securing cryptographic computations in a setting where the adversary has control over the power supply. In such a case, the attacker can drive the environment and modify the behavior of the system as we have shown in Axis 2. Providing the control of the environment is a new vector for attackers.

Christian Grothoff, who leads this axis, got a position in Bern in 2017. This axis is expected to follow him in the future, although Tamis still holds expertise and members to finish ongoing work with the team. Cooperations with Bern are expected in the future.