CyLab Seminar - Paul Pearce

— 1:00pm

Location:
In Person and Virtual - ET - Panther Hollow Room 4105, Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center

Speaker:
PAUL PEARCE , Associate Professor
School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
Georgia Tech University
https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~pearce/

Expectation vs Reality: How Network Abstractions Impact Internet Security

Internet scanning is a critical tool for security research; it has driven development of new security protocols, found and tracked vulnerabilities, and discovered censorship globally. Such scanning is built on top of numerous networking abstractions that obscure network paths, infrastructure, and protocols. Unfortunately, these abstractions mask underlying behaviors that can significantly impact Internet security. In this talk, we will explore the interplay between network infrastructure abstractions and two problem spaces: Internet censorship and the IPv6 Internet. We begin by exploring the role routing and infrastructure have on our understanding of Internet censorship, showing that our mental model for censorship is out of sync with the reality of networks. This disconnect both leads to incorrect understanding of censorship, as well as providing opportunities to develop evasion technology. Next, we will explore the security challenges introduced by the deployment of IPv6, with abstractions and mental models rooted in IPv4. We begin by discussing the development of our IPv6 Internet scanning tool, 6Sense, showing it is effective at scanning the IPv6 Internet. Leveraging 6sense we then explore the security challenges faced by IPv6 networks stemming from global addressing and accessibility, which in turn lead to network vulnerabilities.

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Paul Pearce is currently an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech and is a founding member of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. His research explores attacks, vulnerabilities, and mitigations in online services and systems and across the Internet. He builds Internet-scale measurement systems and designs new empirical methods aimed at discovering real-world complex and unseen adversarial behaviors and vulnerabilities, frequently exploring network infrastructure and the interplay between abstractions and security goals. He has received an NSF CAREER award, an IMC Community Contribution award, distinguished recognition at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and an ACM doctoral dissertation runner-up award. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Paul was a Visiting Researcher with Facebook's Site Integrity group, and he completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley advised by Vern Paxson. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, Cisco, and DARPA.

Faculty Host:  Justine Sherry

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement. 

For More Information:
bethbuch@andrew.cmu.edu

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