Recent years have witnessed the rapid deployment of smart homes; most of them are controlled by remote servers in the cloud. Such designs raise security and privacy concerns for end users. In this article, we describe the design of Sovereign, a home Internet of Things (IoT) system framework that provides end users complete control of their home IoT systems. Sovereign lets home IoT devices and applications communicate via application-named data and secures data directly. This approach enables direct, secure, one-to-one, and one-to-many Device-to-Device communication over wireless broadcast media. Sovereign utilizes semantic names to construct usable security solutions. We implement Sovereign as a publish–subscribe-based development platform together with a prototype home IoT controller. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Sovereign provides a systematic, easy-to-use solution to user-controlled, self-contained smart homes running on existing IoT hardware without imposing noticeable overhead.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have plagued the Internet for decades. Despite the ever-increasing investments into mitigation solution development, DDoS attacks continue to grow with ever-increasing frequency and magnitude. To identify the root cause of the above-observed trend, in this paper, we conduct a systematic and architectural evaluation of volumetric DDoS detection and mitigation efforts over 24,000 papers, articles, and RFCs over 30+ years. To that end, we introduce a novel approach for systematizing comparisons of DDoS research, resulting in a comprehensive examination of the DDoS literature. Our analysis illustrates a small set of common design patterns across seemingly disparate solutions, and reveals insights into deployment traction and success of DDoS solutions. Furthermore, we discuss economic incentives and the lack of harmony between synergistic but independent approaches for detection and mitigation. As expected, defenses with a clear cost/benefit rationale are more prevalent than those that require extensive infrastructure changes. Finally, we discuss the lessons learned which we hope can shed light on future directions that can potentially turn the tide of the war against DDoS.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have plagued the Internet for decades, but the basic defense approaches have not fundamentally changed. Rather, the size and rate of growth in attacks have actually outpaced carriers' and DDoS mitigation services' growth, calling for new solutions that can be, partially or fully, deployed imminently and exhibit effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the basic functions in Named Data Networking (NDN), a newly proposed Internet architecture, that can address the principle weaknesses in today's IP networks. We demonstrate by a new DDoS mitigation solution over NDN, Fine-grained Interest Traffic Throttling FITT, that NDN's architectural changes, even when incrementally deployed, can make DDoS attacks fundamentally more difficult to launch and less effective. FITT leverages the NDN design to enable the network to detect DDoS from victim's feedback, throttles DDoS traffic by reverse its exact paths through the network, and enforces control over the misbehaving entities at their sources. Our extensive simulation results show that FITT can throttle attack traffic with one-way time delay from the victim to the NDN gateway; upon activation, FITT effectively stop attack traffic from impacting benign flows, resulting in over 99\% of packets reaching victims being legitimate ones. We further demonstrate that service providers may implement NDN/FITT on existing CDN nodes as an incrementally deployable solution to effectuate the application level remediation at the sources, which remains unattainable in today's DDoS mitigation approaches.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid deployment of smart homes; most of them are controlled by remote servers in the cloud. Such designs raise security and privacy concerns for end users. In this paper, we describe the design of Sovereign, a home IoT system framework that provides end users complete control of their home IoT systems. Sovereign lets home IoT devices and applications communicate via application-named data and secures data directly. This enables direct, secure, one-to-one and one-to-many device-to-device communication over wireless broadcast media. Sovereign utilizes semantic names to construct usable security solutions. We implement Sovereign as a publish-subscribe-based development platform together with a prototype home IoT controller. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Sovereign provides a systematic, easy-to-use solution to user-controlled, self-contained smart homes running on existing IoT hardware without imposing noticeable overhead.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have plagued the Internet for decades. Despite the ever-increasing investments into mitigation solution development, DDoS attacks continue to grow with ever-increasing frequency and magnitude. To identify the root cause of the above-observed trend, in this paper, we conduct a systematic and architectural evaluation of volumetric DDoS detection and mitigation efforts over 24,000 papers, articles, and RFCs over 30+ years. To that end, we introduce a novel approach for systematizing comparisons of DDoS research, resulting in a comprehensive examination of the DDoS literature. Our analysis illustrates a small set of common design patterns across seemingly disparate solutions, and reveals insights into deployment traction and success of DDoS solutions. Furthermore, we discuss economic incentives and the lack of harmony between synergistic but independent approaches for detection and mitigation. As expected, defenses with a clear cost/benefit rationale are more prevalent than those that require extensive infrastructure changes. Finally, we discuss the lessons learned which we hope can shed light on future directions that can potentially turn the tide of the war against DDoS.