ABSTRACT   |   Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm that decouples the control logic from the closed and proprietary implementations of traditional network data plane infrastructure. SDN enables researchers to more easily design and distribute innovative flow handling and network control algorithms. We believe that SDN can, in time, prove to be one of the more impactful technologies to drive a variety of innovations in network security and security will be a new killer app for SDN. However, to date there remains a stark paucity of SDN security research and development.

In this talk, I will discuss some new opportunities as well as challenges in this new direction, and demonstrate with our recent research results. I will discuss how SDN can enhance network security, e.g., by offering a dramatic simplification to the way we design and integrate complex network security applications/services into large networks. I will also introduce our recent work, PBS (Programmable BYOD Security), a new SDN-motivated security solution to enable fine-grained, application-level network security programmability for the purpose of network management and policy enforcement on mobile apps and devices.

BIO   |   Dr. Guofei Gu is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU). Before coming to Texas A&M, he received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are in network and system security, such as malware and APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) defense, software-defined networking (SDN/NFV) security, mobile/smartphone security, and intrusion/anomaly detection. Dr. Gu is a recipient of 2010 NSF CAREER Award, 2013 AFOSR Young Investigator Award, 2010 IEEE S&P Best Student Paper Award, and 2015 ICDCS Best Paper Award. He has served on the program committees of top-tier security conferences such as IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, USENIX Security, and NDSS, among many others. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS) and the Steering Committee co-chair for International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm). He is currently directing the SUCCESS (Secure Communication and Computer Systems) Lab at TAMU. For more information, visit: http://faculty.cse.tamu.edu/guofei/.