So in research progress, we’ve recently published or had accepted two conference papers in the area of distributed system security. The first is a paper called “Removing the Blinders”, with co-authors David Zage and Cristina Nita-Rotaru. The basic insight of the paper is that in many protocols, nodes make decisions about other nodes based on just the last message they got from them. This is a kind of “blinders”, hiding other information the node has about the other nodes, which prevents them from making smart decisions about the peers based on the holistic information available.
However, the effort required in the first paper is totally manual. Discovering the set of attacks, and then finding the defenses for those attacks is takes a smart person thinking about it for a long time. We next set out to solve part of the problem – discovering the attacks. We focused on a restricted set of systems—those implemented in a structured language such as Mace. By applying a greedy state space exploration search strategy, we can discover a class of attacks that cause poor performance in systems. This work was accepted to NDSS 2012, about a tool we call Gatling.
Meanwhile, part of our current research involves further generalizing this work.