Assessing the security of your Network - the ITU Security Framework

Speaker: Dr. Aftab Ahmad
Thursday, 25 September 2008 at 6:30 PM
Aberdeen Barn, Virginia Beach

As yet, we don't have a way of measuring security, which makes it difficult to allocate resources appropriately for secure networking. The best we have towards this end is the ITU X.805 framework that can be used to assess the security of a network. The recommendation classifies the nature of attacks and security dimensions required to thwart them. The X.805 is a slightly modified version of the Lucent Security Framework, originally designed at Bell Labs. In this presentation, we discuss this framework, how it divides a network into three layers (infrastructure, service and application) and three planes (user, control and management) and defines the attacks in terms of dimensions in each plane and on each layer. We will assess the security of a popular sensor network standard, the IEEE 802.15.4 in light of X.805. In possible future extensions of this presentation, we will analyze the Internet security architecture in view of X.805 with the help of a quality-of-service QoS) intensive application, such as compressed video transmission.

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Aftab Ahmad (D.Sc. '92, GWU) is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He is Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Norfolk State University and a visiting professor at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), RoK. He is the author of two books and several papers in the area of data communications. He has served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Communication Systems (IJCS). Dr. Ahmad was the General Chair of the 11th Communications and Networking Simulation (CNS) symposium in 2008 and Program Chair of the same in 2007. His research interests include resource allocation for quality of service (QoS), network security and computer animation. His expertise includes modeling and simulation of networking systems and security of wireless access networks.

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