CS Colloquium - Rubenstein

Network Resilience: Improving Survivability, Security, and Robustness of Emerging Network SystemsDan RubensteinAssociate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Columbia UniversityAbstract:Computer networks of today and tomorrow need to be deployed rapidly and operate in environments where there is limited cooperation and trust among the nodes composing the network. Examples of such networks include sensor network deployment in a disaster setting, competing 802.11 hotspots, cooperative mesh networks, and delay tolerant networks (DTNs). Such networks are inherently less predictable and more susceptible to accidental or intentional abuses. Our research at Columbia has focused on resilience for this more vulnerable space of networks: how to make them function properly and efficiently when the infrastructure is unplanned, untrusted, insecure, undergoes rapid change, or is attacked.I will begin by describing the various projects in resilience that our lab has focused on over the past several years, and then focus specifically on the problem of control plane monitoring for routing protocols. Distributed routing protocols traditionally assume that all nodes executing the protocol can be trusted to truthfully and correctly report control plane information, but history has demonstrated that sometimes inaccurate information can be propagated with devastating consequences. We develop a theoretical framework that allows us to understand when, using state information provided by a distributed routing protocol, this information can be used to detect erroneous propagation of information. We derive a polynomial-time algorithm for distance vector (Bellman-Ford) and Path-Vector (BGP) style protocols called Strong Detection and prove that if our algorithm cannot detect an error, then the error is undetectable, given the existing state information. We conclude by showing our ongoing work on applicability of Strong Detection to wireless ad-hoc network settings.Biography:Dan Rubenstein is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Columbia University. He received a B.S. degree in mathematics from M.I.T., an M.A. in math from UCLA, and a PhD in computer science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests are in network technologies, applications, and performance analysis, with a substantial emphasis on resilient and secure networking, distributed communication algorithms, and overlay technologies. He has received an NSF CAREER Award, an IBM Faculty Award, the Best Student Paper award from the ACM SIGMETRICS 2000 conference, and a Best Paper award from the IEEE ICNP 2003 Conference.Hosted by Leana GolubchikRefreshments will be served.

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Nancy Levien