Title: Security tests and attack experimentations of ProtoGENI

Authors: Jingcheng Gao; Yang Xiao; Sneha Rao; Fnu Shalini

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, 342 H.M. Comer Hall, 245 7th Avenue, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0290, USA ' Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, 342 H.M. Comer Hall, 245 7th Avenue, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0290, USA ' Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, 342 H.M. Comer Hall, 245 7th Avenue, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0290, USA ' Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, 342 H.M. Comer Hall, 245 7th Avenue, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0290, USA

Abstract: Tests and experiments to investigate selected security issues through ProtoGENI are conducted throughout this paper. The ProtoGENI is through its Spiral 1 time period, which primarily focuses on developing control and aggregating functions, up to the beginning of Spiral 4 time period now. Spiral 4 focuses on the transition from a rapid-prototyping effort to a 'real GENI' that supports network research experimentation. Owing to the lack of security related functions in the ProtoGENI's initial status, there is a necessity to explore the security vulnerabilities of ProtoGENI. Throughout the past several Spiral time periods, we designed four major sets of security tests and experiments, to examine certain types of its security vulnerabilities. All of the above tests and experiments showed that it is very possible that ProtoGENI nodes may render vulnerabilities to these attacks.

Keywords: attacks; global environment for network innovations; GENI; ProtoGENI security; security tests; attack experiments; network security; security vulnerabilities.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2015.071834

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2015 Vol.10 No.3, pp.151 - 169

Received: 26 Feb 2015
Accepted: 26 Feb 2015
Published online: 19 Sep 2015 *

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