Improving the Security, Privacy, and Anonymity of a Client-Server Network through the Application of a Moving Target Defense

The amount of data that is shared on the Internet is growing at an alarming rate. Current estimates state that approximately 2.5 exabytes of data were generated every day in 2012. This rate is only growing as people continue to increase their on-line presence. As the amount of data grows, so too do the number of people who are attempting to gain access to the data. Attackers try many methods to gain access to information, including a number of attacks that occur at the network layer. A network-based moving target defense is a technique that obfuscates the location of a machine on the Internet by arbitrarily changing its IP address periodically. MT6D is one of these techniques that leverages the size of the IPv6 address space to make it statistically impossible for an attacker to find a specific target machine. MT6D was designed with a number of limitations that include manually generated static configurations and support for only peer to peer networks. This work presents extensions to MT6D that provide dynamically generated configurations, a secure and dynamic means of exchanging configurations, and with these new features, an ability to function as a server supporting a large number of clients. This work makes three primary contributions to the field of network-based moving target defense systems. First, it provides a means to exchange arbitrary information in a way that provides network anonymity, authentication, and security. Second, it demonstrates a technique that gives MT6D the capability to exchange configuration information by only sharing public keys. Finally, it introduces a session establishment protocol that clients can use to establish concurrent connections with an MT6D server.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and ComputerEngineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Morrell, Christopher Frank

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Tront, Joseph G.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Marchany, Randolph C.
• Yao, Danfeng (Daphne)
• Clancy, Thomas Charles III
• Midkiff, Scott F.

• IPv6
• Security
• Privacy
• Moving Target Defense
• Client Server Network

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:7326

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/79791