Architectures for Secure and Robust Distributed Infrastructures

摘要

The major barrier constraining the successful management and design of large-scale distributed infrastructures is the conspicuous lack of knowledge about their dynamical features and behaviors. Up until very recently analysis of systems such as the Internet, or the national electricity distribution system, have primarily relied on the use of non-dynamical models, which neglect their complex, and frequently subtle, inherent dynamical properties. These traditional approaches have enjoyed considerable success while systems are run in predominantly cooperative environments, and provided that their performance boundaries are not approached. With the current proliferation of applications using and relying on such infrastructures, these infrastructures are becoming increasingly stressed, and as a result the incentives for malicious attacks are heightening. The stunning fact is that the fundamental assumptions under which significant large-scale distributed infrastructures have been constructed and analyzed no longer hold; the invalidity of these non-dynamical assumptions is witnessed with the greater frequency of catastrophic failures in major infrastructures such as the Internet, the power grid, the air traffic system, and national-scale telecommunications systems. This project is about network reliability and robustness in large-scale systems. To address the challenges posed by dynamical behavior of large-scale network infrastructures we bring to bear the tools and techniques of control theory together with those from communication networks and queuing theory. In particular, the algorithms and analytical approaches of control used for developing control strategies and logic are combined with protocol design methods to construct new, secure architectures for distributed networks.