We describe quantum protocols for voting and surveying. A key feature of our schemes is the use of entangled states to ensure that the votes are anonymous and to allow the votes to be tallied. The entanglement is distributed over separated sites; the physical inaccessibility of any one site is sufficient to guarantee the anonymity of the votes. The security of these protocols with respect to various kinds of attack is discussed. We also discuss classical schemes and show that our quantum voting protocol represents a $N$-fold reduction in computational complexity, where $N$ is the number of voters.

SIP DDoS attack is growing and has a real threat to crippling public communication infrastructure. The standard approach to building the defense is at or near the attack destination (i.e. victim's location). This approach is struggling to keep up with the growing volume and attack sophistication. To be better prepared for future attacks, the workload needs to be distributed, and the attack needs to be mitigated as close to the attack source as possible. This paper experiments with data plane programming (P4) and control plane programming of Ethernet switches to provide first-hop detection and mitigation capability for SIP INVITE DDoS attack at every switchport. This approach creates a distributed or source-based defense component which could be added to the existing destination-based components to create a more comprehensive overall solution that is extensible, economical, and scalable against SIP DDoS attack of the future.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control protocol used to establish and terminate calls that are deployed globally. A flood of SIP INVITE packets sent by an attacker causes a Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) incident, during which legitimate users are unable to use telephony services. Legacy TDoS defense is typically implemented as network appliances and not sufficiently deployed to enable early detection. To make TDoS defense more widely deployed and yet affordable, this paper presents TDoSD@DP where TDoS detection and mitigation is programmed at the data plane so that it can be enabled on every switch port and therefore serves as distributed SIP sensors. With this approach, the damage is isolated at a particular switch and bandwidth saved by not sending attack packets further upstream. Experiments have been performed to track the SIP state machine and to limit the number of active SIP session per port. The results show that TDoSD@DP was able to detect and mitigate ongoing INVITE flood attack, protecting the SIP server, and limiting the damage to a local switch. Bringing the TDoS defense function to the data plane provides a novel data plane application that operates at the SIP protocol and a novel approach for TDoS defense implementation.

The problem of selfishness and misbehaviour in wireless networks is well known, as are the associated solutions that have been proposed for it in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and Wireless Sensory Network (WSN). However, tackling such problem in relation to the Internet of Things (IoT) is relatively new since the IoT is still under development. The central communication infrastructure of IoT is the IEEE 802.15.4 standard which defines low-rate and low energy wireless personal area networks. In order to share the medium fairly and efficiently in a beacon-enabled mode, the standard uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) in the Contention Access Period (CAP), and Guarantee Time Slot (GTS) in the Contention Free Period (CFP) of a super-frame. These channel sharing mechanisms are known to be vulnerable to selfishness, misbehaviour and channel capture as a result of nodes disobeying the communication rules. Most of the existing game theoretic solutions were designed for IEEE 802.11 WLAN and WSN. In this work, we present a dynamic game in which nodes can select and adapt their strategies of play according to the 'state of the game' and their energy level in order to increase their utility whenever their utility declined. Our model enables resources constrained nodes to optimised their strategies individually based upon the current state of the game and their available resources. Our analysis and simulation results suggest an improvement in utility, and fairness in channel sharing, as well as efficiency in energy usage in our dynamic model and hence performance and security in our scheme over the default IEEE 802.15.4 access mechanism.

The exponential growth in the number of devices connected via the internet has led to the need to achieve granular programmability for increased performance, resilience, reduced latency, and jitter. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Programming Protocol independent Packet Processing (P4) are designed to introduce programmability into the control and data plane of networks, respectively. Despite their individual potential and capabilities, the performance of combining SDN and P4 remains underexplored. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of SDN with data plane programmability using P4 (SDN+P4) against traditional SDN with Open vSwitch (SDN+OvS), aimed at answering the hypothesis that combining SDN and P4 strengthens the control and data plane programmability and offers improved management and adaptability, which would provide a platform with faster packet processing with reduced jitter, loss, and processing overhead. Mininet was employed to emulate three distinct topologies: multi-path, grid, and transit-stub. Various traffic types were transmitted to assess performance metrics across the three topologies. Our results demonstrate that SDN+P4 outperform SDN+OvS significantly due to parallel processing, flexible parsing, and reduced overhead. The evaluation demonstrates the potential of SDN+P4 to provide a more resilient and stringent service with improved network performance for the future internet and its heterogeneity of applications.