Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 17th EAI International Conference, SecureComm 2021, Virtual Event, September 6–9, 2021, Proceedings, Part I

Research Article

MPD: Moving Target Defense Through Communication Protocol Dialects

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-030-90019-9_6,
        author={Yongsheng Mei and Kailash Gogineni and Tian Lan and Guru Venkataramani},
        title={MPD: Moving Target Defense Through Communication Protocol Dialects},
        proceedings={Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 17th EAI International Conference, SecureComm 2021, Virtual Event, September 6--9, 2021, Proceedings, Part I},
        proceedings_a={SECURECOMM},
        year={2021},
        month={11},
        keywords={Protocol dialect Moving target defense},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-030-90019-9_6}
    }
    
  • Yongsheng Mei
    Kailash Gogineni
    Tian Lan
    Guru Venkataramani
    Year: 2021
    MPD: Moving Target Defense Through Communication Protocol Dialects
    SECURECOMM
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-90019-9_6
Yongsheng Mei1, Kailash Gogineni1, Tian Lan1, Guru Venkataramani1
  • 1: The George Washington University

Abstract

Communication protocol security is among the most significant challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT) due to the wide variety of hardware and software technologies involved. Moving target defense (MTD) has been adopted as an innovative strategy to solve this problem by dynamically changing target system properties and configurations to obfuscate the attack surface. Nevertheless, the existing work of MTD primarily focuses on lower-level properties (e.g., IP addresses or port numbers), and only a limited number of variations can be generated based on these properties. In this paper, we propose a new approach of MTD through communication protocol dialects (MPD) - which dynamically customizes a communication protocol into various protocol dialects and leverages them to create a moving target defense. Specifically, MPD harnesses a dialect generating function to create protocol dialects and then a mapping function to select one specific dialect for each packet during communication. To keep different network entities in synchronization, we also design a self-synchronization mechanism utilizing a pseudo-random number generator with the input of a pre-shared secret key and previously sent packets. We implement a prototype of MPD and evaluate its feasibility on standard network protocol (i.e., File Transfer Protocol) and internet of things protocol (i.e., Message Queuing Telemetry Transport). The results indicate that MPD can create a moving target defense with protocol dialects to effectively address various attacks - including the denial of service attack and malicious packet modifications - with negligible overhead.