InfraTrust: Enabling trustworthy services over vulnerable physical network infrastructure

This project focuses on enabling resilience, security and reliability of network services running on top of an optical network infrastructure vulnerable to physical-layer attacks.

Uninterrupted and secure operation of high-performance communication networks is a key enabler of the ongoing evolution towards a networked society.

Critical network infrastructure that underpins the global Internet communications relies on optical fiber networks as the only future-proof solution capable of supporting the proliferating bandwidth-hungry applications, providing ultra-high capacity, and carrying massive amounts of data at extremely high rates over long distances.

It is an attractive target of attacks aimed at breaching communication confidentiality, integrity, or availability.

Security breaches at the optical layer can have rippling disruptive effects across multiple tiers stacked on top of it and can jeopardize the upper-layer services regardless of the application-level security mechanisms.

Currently, physical-layer security perspective is completely absent from the design, provisioning and recovery of upper-layer services.

The project will develop a new, bottom-up approach to network security that incorporates a physical-layer perspective into fundamental problems related to the design and optimization of next-generation network services, with the goal of maximizing the overall resilience to attacks that exploit physical-layer vulnerabilities of the optical network infrastructure.