Programmable cyber networks for critical infrastructure

The operational integrity of the infrastructure systems is critical for a nation state’s economic and security interests. Such systems rely on automation to perform complex control tasks to avoid malfunction caused by human error. However, such automation requires coordination of their components. Such coordination relies on several guarantees of safety and performance from their underlying cyber networks. It is challenging to provide such guarantees using traditional networks due to their rigid feature set and distributed, opaque and non-standard control interfaces. The central goal of this dissertation is to develop a set of design tools that use network programmability to achieve end-to-end delay, access control and resiliency guarantees for critical infrastructure (CI) applications. We propose and evaluate the architecture and design of several tools to address these guarantees singularly and simultaneously. With the standardized control and data-planes, the computational analysis of the centralized network configurations has emerged as a powerful approach for solving a variety of problems. We used this approach in one of our analysis tools to simultaneously validate access control and resilience of networks. We also used an analytic approach to assess the resiliency of CI network with the use of metrics computed by using Monte Carlo methods. To that end, we built a data-plane simulator to enable such computation. Furthermore, it is now feasible to synthesize desired behavior in a programmable CI network to meet the performance and resilience goals for individual application flows. We used the synthesis approach to build a tool that uses efficient centralized algorithms to synthesize control-plane configuration resulting in flows meeting their end-to-end delay deadlines. We also demonstrate a framework that uses synthesis at the intersection of control and data planes to implement network coding to achieve seamless resiliency for network flows.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Kumar, Rakesh

Contributors dc:contributor

• Nicol, David M.
• Bailey, Michael D
• Vaidya, Nitin H.
• Caesar, Matthew

• Critical Infrastructure Networking Reliability Resilience Security

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2019 Rakesh Kumar

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106221

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/106221