Newton Meets Vivaldi: Securing Virtual Coordinates by Enforcing Physical Laws
Project Members
Jeff Seibert, Sheila Becker, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Radu State
Jeff Seibert, Sheila Becker, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Radu State
Abstract
Virtual coordinate systems (VCS) provide accurate
estimations of latency between arbitrary hosts on a network,
while conducting a small amount of actual measurements and
relying on node cooperation. While these systems have good
accuracy under benign settings, they suffer a severe decrease
of their effectiveness when under attack by compromised nodes
acting as insider attackers. Previous defenses mitigate such
attacks by using machine learning techniques to differentiate
good behavior (learned over time) from bad behavior. However,
these defense schemes have been shown to be vulnerable to
advanced attacks that make the schemes learn malicious behavior
as good behavior.
We present Newton, a decentralized VCS that is robust to
a wide class of insider attacks. Newton uses an abstraction of
a real-life physical system, similar to that of Vivaldi, but in
addition uses safety invariants derived from Newton’s laws of
motion. As a result, Newton does not need to learn good behavior
and can tolerate a significantly higher percentage of malicious
nodes. We show through simulations and real-world experiments
on the PlanetLab testbed that Newton is able to mitigate all
known attacks against VCS while providing better accuracy than
Vivaldi, even in benign settings.