Joud Khoury

P3S: a privacy preserving publish-subscribe middleware

This paper presents P3S, a publish-subscribe middleware designed to protect the privacy of subscriber interest and confidentiality of published content. P3S combines recent advances in cryptography, specifically Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) and Predicate Based Encryption (PBE) with an innovative architecture to achieve the desired level of privacy. An initial P3S prototype has been implemented on top of a COTS JMS platform (ActiveMQ). Results of preliminary security analysis and initial evaluation of latency and throughput indicate that the P3S design is both practical and flexible to provide different levels of privacy for publish-subscribe messaging over various message sizes and network bandwidth settings.

A Survey of Novel Internetwork (and Naming) Architectures

Internet architectures may be broadly categorized into either incremental or radical proposals. Incremental architectures generally aim at addressing particular limitations of the current Internet architecture through patching, while radical architectures tend to adopt a clean-slate approach to designing a better Internet, without being necessarily restricted by the current Internet model. We classify network architectural proposals based on the service model they intend to support. This highlights a growing interest in data-centric network services. This chapter serves two main purposes: (1) to survey the literature and highlight commonalities and differences across the spectrum of solutions, and (2) to present a reference for the rest of the book, and introductory tutorial.

Passive, Decentralized, and Fully Autonomous Intersection Access Control

Current research on autonomous intersection management makes a set of assumptions including active Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) or Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications, and/or centralized control. While they enhance the efficiency of the solution, such assumptions have inherent security and privacy drawbacks and require high infrastructure costs. This paper sets to investigate an alternative solution to autonomous intersection management that is decentralized (no centralized controller) and passive (no vehicle communications). Our scheme permits autonomous vehicles approaching an intersection to make localized collision-free access decisions based purely on sensing and beacon information. Besides demonstrating the feasibility of a fully autonomous and decentralized approach, we show that our scheme operationally outperforms a standard actuated signal and all-way stop control. Our decentralized approach trades off optimality for low cost, and enhanced security, privacy, and practicality.

Brief announcement: scalable anonymous communication with byzantine adversary

We describe an algorithm for fully-anonymous broadcast in large-scale networks. The protocol is similar to the dining cryptographers networks (DC-Nets) in that both are based on secure multi-party computation (MPC) techniques. However, we address the weaknesses of DC-Nets, which are poor scalability and vulnerability to jamming attacks. When compared to the state-of-the-art, our protocol reduces the total bit complexity from O(n2) to Õ(n) per anonymous message sent in a network of size n at the expense of an increase in total latency from O(1) to polylog(n). Our protocol can tolerate up to 1/3 dishonest parties, which are controlled by a static computationally-unbounded Byzantine adversary.

Content sharing with mobility in an infrastructure-less environment

Abstract Current networking technologies are ill-suited for content sharing in emerging military and first-responder networks where fixed infrastructures and stable connectivity cannot be assumed. New paradigms, in particular content-based networking, is proving to be a viable solution for operation in mobile infrastructure-less environments where intermittent and disrupted connectivity is normal. This paper presents CASCADE, a content-centric networking architecture that facilitates generation and dissemination of content in challenging “edge” environments. CASCADE is implemented in Android and has been subjected to thorough performance evaluation using both ad hoc Wi-Fi technology as well as military tactical radios. This paper discusses architectural approaches and decisions, and offers insights and lessons learned over the course of the project.

A Practical Approach to Decentralized Intersection Access Control for Autonomous Vehicles

In a shift from the current research trend which is mostly geared towards centralizing access control of autonomous vehicles at intersection of the near future, the authors extend their previously presented intersection management model, which is fully decentralized. Even though it is the most efficient, central control requires fully automated connected vehicles, active vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, which introduces inherent security, privacy and feasibility issues. We simulate autonomous intelligent vehicles making local access decisions at isolated intersections, with only sensing and/or beacon information. The simulation proves to be collision-free. The extended management model is now able to account for various vehicle classes, all possible turns at the intersection and safe turning speeds. Compared to a standard signal controller, the proposed and improved model is again proven to be operationally more efficient.

Participation Incentives in BGP

We use game theory to model a general participation game. The main problem we are interested in is how to achieve broad participation while aligning the incentives of all the participating agents. A consumer node is willing to invest some initial amount of money to get a set of networked nodes, alternatively agents, to participate in a desirable activity. The consumer, in this case a BGP speaker, desires to advertise itself; however, it may only communicate with its direct neighbors. Therefore, it must incentivize its neighbors to participate in further advertising its route, who then incentivize their neighbors to participate, and so on. We assume the commodity being traded to be the agent’s participation. In the resulting game, agents choose their offers strategically and they are rewarded by volume of sales. We prove the existence of equilibria for specific utility functions and simple network structures.

On the Economics of Identifier-Based Discovery

We present a broad treatment of the main economic issues that arise in the context of name-based discovery. Providing a discovery service while accounting for the cost and making sure that the incentives of the players are aligned is the general theme. We motivate the subject, and we present a taxonomy of discovery schemes and proposals based on their business model.

On the Feasibility of Dynamic, Efficient, and Scalable Name-Based Discovery Systems

Traditionally, the design of name-based discovery systems on the Internet has assumed the existence of some underlying “efficient” routing scheme(s) that is location-aware along with a means to map from higher level names to location-based routing identifiers (or locators). The alternative is to redesign the discovery scheme to operate on location-independent names (or identifiers) without the need for the locators. The literature is replete with such proposals, and indeed, there has been renewed attention in the networking community on revisiting the question: what if we start with persistent names and attempt to design a discovery scheme whose main currency is the persistent names? Starting with persistent names is appealing as it eliminates the notion of “location” along with the complications that come with overloading (or even separating) identity and location identifiers. This potentially allows named objects to relocate more seamlessly. The notion of discovery/routing on persistent names however raises many questions on the feasibility of such approaches. This chapter explores general models aimed at studying such alternatives for designing name-based discovery systems for the Internet. Designing a discovery system is commonly challenged with providing three desirable properties: scalability, efficiency, and adaptability which we describe shortly. While there are several other design dimensions involved, we focus on these three to keep the design space tractable and to explore some fundamental tradeoffs a designer is generally faced with.

A Taxonomy of Naming Architectures

This chapter bridges the gap between the high-level literature survey and our formal definitions of naming and addressing. Our goal is to devise a simple taxonomy that accommodates a multitude of naming architectures. In addition to framing the solution space, the taxonomy is intended to serve as a tutorial, to present a consistent terminology, to help find similarities and differences among architectural designs, and more importantly to help identify new avenues for contributing to the topic.