InfraTrust: Enabling trustworthy services over vulnerable physical network infrastructure

Research Project, 2024 – 2027

Uninterrupted and secure operation of high-performance communication networks is a key enabler of the ongoing evolution towards a networked society. The critical network infrastructure that underpins global Internet communications relies primarily on optical fiber networks as the only future-proof solution capable of supporting the bandwidth-intensive applications, providing high capacity and high data rates over long distances.  Such networks are a very desirable target of attacks which are becoming more sophisticated, more frequent, and more damaging in their efforts to harm the optical network infrastructure and disrupt services that run on top of it.

This project proposes an innovative holistic system to incorporate physical-layer security considerations into fundamental problems related to design and provisioning of overlay network services.  We will develop new models for and metrics for evaluating the attainable levels of security and resiliency for upper layer services running on top of a vulnerable physical network infrastructure. An innovative optimization framework for network service deployment will be designed to minimize the damaging potential of physical-layer attacks, i.e., to make it as hard as possible to affect upper layer services by attacking the physical network. New approaches for service recovery from physical-layer attacks will be developed to minimize the service interruption duration through careful pre-planning of recovery resources or ad-hoc service restoration.

The approaches developed in this project will be the first of their kind to enable understanding of fundamental trade-offs between different aspects of security and performance parameters such as resource usage, energy efficiency, communication latency and service recovery time, and improving the attainable levels of security of services deployed over insecure network infrastructure.