HAEC: Project A08 “Distributed Cross-Layer Security for Dynamic Networks”

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• Kontakt: Dr.-Ing. Elke Franz 

Beschreibung

The vision of the Collaborative Research Center 912 HAEC (Highly Adaptive Energy-efficient Computing) is to research technologies to enable computing systems with high energy efficiency without compromising on high performance. The new technologies will be integrated into the HAEC Box, a novel concept of future computing platforms. Project A08 is one of about 20 projects of CRC HAEC.

The main goal of project A08 is to ensure a secure and efficient communication between the nodes of the HAEC Box. To reach this goal, we investigate the use of various communication schemes that can be integrated on different layers. As promising approach for efficient communication, we evaluate network coding schemes enhanced by security measures to ensure the relevant protection goals confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We will investigate possibilities to enhance the efficiency of secure network coding schemes. Further goals are the selection of a secure path between sender and receiver(s), and methods to efficiently and securely handle multiple flows. Alternative secure communication schemes and parameters for these schemes establish a basis for an adaptive selection of a best suited communication scheme that should be enabled within the HAEC Box.

A further direction of research is physical layer security and the combination of such methods with mechanisms at upper layers (cross-layer security). State-of-the-art physical layer security mainly focuses on secure point-to-point connections between two nodes, which share a direct link, while upper layer security abstracts from technical details available at lower layers. Several methods have been discussed in the literature to derive secret key bits from a physical channel estimation between communication partners. We will examine possibilities for key exchange between arbitrary nodes of the HAEC Box that do not necessarily share a channel. Further, unique characteristics of the physical channel can be utilized for mutual authentication of communicating nodes. However, there is a need to investigate how such information can be used at upper layers to increase the trustworthiness of communication in a multi-hop network.

We will examine efficient protection of various collaborative communication scenarios that arise in execution of parallel applications and the process of mapping or migrating processes to other nodes considering efficiency of secure communication. Based on previous results achieved in Phase I of the CRC HAEC, these questions will be investigated in cooperation with project A04 (Nagel) using the HAEC simulator. We will continue to model the performance of the secure communication schemes in terms of communication delays and develop their associated energy models. The resulting models are a necessary input for the evaluation of our communication schemes at an application scale, i.e. large scale, by means of the HAEC simulator developed by A04 (Nagel).