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Principal Investigator: Venkat Pothamsetty Project Description: This project attempts to document and classify protocol-related vulnerabilities and the corresponding engineering (design, implementation and testing) countermeasures, with a goal of helping the engineering teams not repeat the errors that are the root causes of these vulnerabilities. Project Impact: Vulnerabilities arising from insecure network protocol design and implementation present significant challenges to the network protocol community. Yet, much of the focus is on software vulnerabilities and engineering best practices related to general-purpose operating systems and applications. Several network protocol-related vulnerabilities are being repeated in network devices as well as the poor engineering design and implementation errors that make these vulnerabilities possible. Our goal is to highlight these vulnerabilities and engineering errors in an accessible form such that the design, implementation and testing teams can use our work in their respective processes to find and prevent the corresponding vulnerabilities. Project Details: The numbers of protocol-related vulnerabilities that have been reported are relatively large. The factors that can be attributed to the relatively large number of vulnerabilities are the number of protocols that have been developed and the front line of defense that the protocol implementations offer to packets. Our initial investigation task is to find any patterns or framework common across all these vulnerabilities. When dealing with the problem of extracting relevant and needed information from a large data set of vulnerabilities, researchers in the past have taken the approach of "categorization". Our taxonomy factors should be in line with the overall goal of the document: To help the engineering teams find and prevent the protocol vulnerabilities that show up repeatedly. Therefore, we decided that the primary taxonomies that we require are the test technique taxonomy for the testing teams and the best practices taxonomy for the design and implementation teams. Both the testing and engineering efforts focus on the same set of "vulnerabilities" (testing aims to find the vulnerabilities and implementation aims to fix the same), so we need to develop a vulnerability taxonomy as well. We decided to attack the problem with three-fold taxonomy: the vulnerability taxonomy, the test technique taxonomy and the best practices taxonomy. In addition, we also need to layout different test metrics which help the testing teams observe and analyze the impact of the corresponding test techniques. The reader should note that we are using the word taxonomy in a loose sense. For this document, the word means a classification scheme in which we can describe and classify all possible protocol related vulnerabilities. Project Deliverables: Status: Completed |
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