Seminar Title: Turret: A Platform for Automated Adversarial Testing of Distributed Systems and Network Protocols
Speaker: Professor Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Dept. of Computer Science, Purdue University
Abstract:
Numerous distributed systems and network protocols have been designed and subjected to theoretical analysis and simulations. However, checking the protocol design and testing simulator-based implementations do not guarantee that real-world implementations are free of bugs and vulnerabilities. In order to understand the limitations and increase the robustness of distributed services and network protocols there is benefit in performing adversarial testing. Adversarial testing tests implementations beyond their basic functionality by testing edge cases, boundary conditions, and ultimately performing destructive testing.

We introduce Turret a platform that provides support for automated adversarial testing for message-passing distributed systems and network protocols. The platform uses a network emulator to create reproducible network conditions and virtualization to run unmodified binaries of the target system. The platform requires the user to provide a description of the protocol messages and corresponding performance metrics. Turret supports a large class of services such as intrusion-tolerant replication, application-layer multicast, file sharing, locality services, and routing protocols, running in both wired and wireless networks. We applied Turret to 5 distributed systems and 3 wireless routing protocols and found a total of 65 attacks and bugs.

Speaker Bio:

Cristina Nita-Rotaru is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University where she established the Dependable and Secure Distributed Systems Laboratory (DS2), and is a member of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). Her research lies at the intersection of information security, distributed systems, and computer networks. The overarching goal of her work is designing and building practical distributed systems and network protocols that are robust to failures and attacks while coping with the resource constraints existent in computing systems and networks.

Cristina Nita-Rotaru is a recipient of the NSF Career Award in 2006. She has served on the Technical Program Committee of numerous conferences in security, networking and distributed systems. She is currently an Associate Editor for ACM Transaction of Dependable and Secure Computing, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (exiting), IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Computers, and Elsevier Computer Networks.