Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Extensible Network Configuration and Communication Framework Todd Sproull and John Lockwood 7 th International Working Conference on Active and Programmable Networks (IWAN) November

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Overview Background –Project motivation Extensible Network Configuration Architecture Experimental Results –Initial results using the Emulab testbed Conclusions

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Background Administrators currently overwhelmed securing networks Wireless Router Traffic Shaper Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) NAT / Firewall Intrusion Detection System (IDS) Security devices in the network help combat the problem –Intrusion Detection or Prevention Systems (IDS) or (IPS) –Packet shapers –Firewalls Overhead associated with managing these devices is fairly high –Require manual configuration –Lack interoperability with other security devices

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Problem Statement Objective –Develop generic infrastructure for management of security devices Challenges –Need an abstraction for communication between heterogeneous security devices –Need to provide interfaces to configure key components of a security device Example: Ability to update rules on each firewall supported in the overlay Proposed Solution –Deploy an overlay network of security devices –Allow nodes to communicate through eXtensible Markup Language (XML) –Create generic abstractions of a device are advertised to peers Example: “Advertisement: I provide firewall capabilities”

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Description of Framework Create overlay network of security devices Devices subscribe to events of interest –Administrative Updates –Virus Signatures –Malicious IP flows to rate limit Administrator joins overlay to issue updates –Messages sent to each peer or a single group Nodes communicate with each other through services Nodes discover services in each group ? ? ? ? ? Nodes create and join groups of interest –Administrative –Firewall –Anomaly Detection Overlay software interfaces directly with applications executing on the node –Modifying configuration files –Restarting processes Wireless Router Traffic Shaper Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) NAT / Firewall Intrusion Detection System (IDS)

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Implementation Overlay network built using the JXTA API –Provides open infrastructure to create Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks Protocols built into JXTA include –Peer Discovery Discover peers, groups, and service in the overlay –Endpoint Routing Provide route information to peers, simplifying communication behind firewalls and NAT –Pipe Binding Creates communication channels for sending and receiving XML messages Supports various programming languages –Java (J2SE) –C –Mobile Java (J2ME) –Ruby

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Example Security Nodes Current research explores three hardware platforms Wireless RouterWorkstationExtensible Switch Intrusion Detection or Prevention Snort with limited ruleset Snort or BroFPGA Snort Lite Quality of ServiceLinksys QoS Support Hierarchical Token Buckets (HTB) FPGA Queue Manager Anomaly or Event Detection NoneSPADEFPGA Worm Detector FPX with FPGA Hardware Pentium M Embedded Processor 200MHz MIPS

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Experimental Setup Testbed experiment evaluates overhead in Processing and Routing XML Messages in JXTA –XML Publish/Subscribe –JXTA Pipes Creation –JXTA Message Notification Traffic Generator sends XML messages to Publisher Publisher parses XML messages and forwards message to clients based on individual service subscription Experiment created in Emulab testbed – 2GHz Pentium 4 nodes –100Mbit/sec Ethernet links Publisher Subscribers Network A Network B XML Traffic Generator

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Experimental Results Experiments performed measure packet loss as packets per second (pps) increase –XML Traffic Generator increases pps to Publisher –Publisher forwards relevant messages to a single subscriber All messages forwarded in this experiment –Loss represents packets not received by subscriber Relatively low performance deal with overhead in JXTA creating an “output pipe” for each connection –The overhead is approximately 40ms per connection Potential optimizations –Creating output pipe once per node, assuming the peer is available –Utilizing JXTA sockets instead of JXTA pipes

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Future Work Evaluate security functions of the overlay –Example: Benchmark nodes ability to update firewall rules in the presence of an attack Deploy all three platforms in one testbed environment –Utilize Open Network Labs Testbed for developing high performance network applications –Investigate Hardware Plug-ins

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Conclusions Proposed Architecture for Network Configuration and Communication –Overlay network distributing XML messages between devices Developed and deployed framework in network testbed Obtained Preliminary Results –Quantified overhead of JXTA protocol and XML message parsing in publish subscribe network

Extensible Networking Platform IWAN 2005 Acknowledgments Research Group –Reconfigurable Network Group