Sharon Goldberg
Princeton University

TITLE:
A Cryptographic Study of Secure Internet Measurement

ABSTRACT:
The Internet is an indispensable part of our information society, and yet its
basic foundations remain vulnerable to simple attacks, and
one area that remains especially susceptible to attack is routing. There have
been increasing efforts in the networking community to
incorporate security into current routing protocols, and secure Internet
measurement is necessary to inform any routing protocol. In this
talk we will show how to use theoretical tools to give a rigorous treatment of
this security problem. We believe our work shows that
rigorous techniques, and even tools for negative results such as reducing to
one-way functions or black-box separations, can have an
immediate impact on the study of security problems of real-world importance.

We describe two definitions for this problem: fault detection (FD) where the
honest parties only want to know if the packets they sent
were dropped or modified or not, and fault localization (FL) where the honest
parties want to know in addition where exactly their
packets were modified or dropped. Besides traditional per-packet definitions
where we want to know the fate of every packet, we also
propose *statistical* definitions that reduce the communication and storage
overhead of protocols yet retain useful security properties.
We will sketch constructions of schemes that satisfy our security definitions
and have desirable practical properties.

Next, we show the negative results implied by our definitions. In particular, we
can show the necessity of keys, cryptography, and storage
in any secure FD or FL scheme. We will describe in detail the proof of our
result that any secure black-box construction of a FL protocol
requires cryptography to be performed at each node. This result uses a novel
application of the black-box separation technique of
Impagliazzo-Rudich and the learning algorithm of Naor-Rothblum.

This is joint work with David Xiao, Boaz Barak, and Jennifer Rexford.