This research consist of three integrated projects.
1. VoIP Security: This is funded by National Science Foundation. The main site at University of North Texas at Denton. A Test-bed to Study Security Issues in IP Telephony (funded by NSF) : Over the past few years, there has been rapid development and deployment of new strategic services using the IP protocol, including Voice-over-IP (VoIP), peer-to-peer, and IP-based media distribution (IPTV). These services ride on private and public IP networks and share their network with other services, such as web traffic. These new services are being aggressively deployed and it is estimated that in a few years most enterprises and residences will be transitioning from a circuit-switched to VoIP services. For example, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Navy have announced the deployment of 400,000 and 300,000 IP phones, respectively. Similarly, Bank of America, American Airlines, and Ford Motor Company have announced plans for migration. It is envisioned that interactive multimedia and broadcast video services will be reusing the infrastructure that is being deployed for VoIP. The new services require security, robustness, and quality of service beyond those needed for email, web access and the like. Mobility adds another dimension of complexity to these new services. With the increasing penetration of the new services, the IP-based multimedia communications service will become a critical infrastructure. The goal of this infrastructure acquisition project is to create a testbed for supporting experiments that can be used for research, development and testing of inter-domain security, QoS mechanisms for new services such as voice, multimedia, and video. In addition, we plan to experiment with next-generation emergency calling for VoIP systems.
2. Traffic Analysis for Network Security Applications (Funded y Sandia National Labs): This proposed project addresses three related problems in cyber security 1) application identification, 2) content identification, and 3) detecting the presence of hidden content. While these problems are important independently, they constitute the key components of a multilevel solution to mitigate insider attacks. In such an attack a malicious user with access to the enterprise network can disseminate critical data using the enterprise network. In order to mitigate insider attacks it is necessary to develop a multi-layer approach that can identify applications, identify that the data and/or the content embedded in the application is protected data, and in the extreme case detect content that are hidden in valid open media using some steganographic tool.
3. Security and QoS Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks (Funded by France Telecom and UC Discovery): The focus of this work is on fixed wireless mesh networks. Wireless mesh networks provide a new novel method for access and enables new applications and services. The following are the key aspects of this proposed research. 1) Transport Issues and Application Optimization: This part of the research effort will focus on methods and approaches to optimize applications over the mesh. Our focus will be on voice and video applications that require delays and bandwidth guarantees. We will develop delay aware routing algorithms to support voice and video application. Another aspect of the effort will focus on transport layer protocols. In particular, we will investigate how existing transport protocols can be tuned to meet the QoS requirements of the application. 2) Security Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: While the mesh network provides a novel access technology and promise of new application and services, there are also significant security challenges. As part of this research and development work we will taxonomy vulnerabilities in wireless mesh network and investigate approaches to address some of them that are unique to mesh networks. Another aspect of this research will be to develop methods to create signatures of wireless hosts based on the traffic pattern generated by each host. 3) Usage pattern, new applications, and services: A key aspect of this experimental research work will be to monitor usage pattern of the users. This will help in tuning and control of mesh as well as develop new application and services. Two important aspect of this work will be the experimental component and the industry focus. The experimental component of this work will consist of deployment of wireless mesh network that will be used by students within the campus. The experimental aspect of the research will be carried out over this test-bed.
UC Daivis
Tracy Liu (PhD)
Rennie Archibald (PhD)
Xioaling Qiu (PhD)
Matt Masuda (Undergraduate)
Dipak Ghosal
Sandia National Labs
Ken Chiang
Cherita Corbett
France Telecom
John Benko
Wei Li
Please send e-mail to ghosal@cs.ucdavis.edu to request a copy of the following papers.