Seminar • Systems and Networking — Watching the Watchmen: Trustworthy Network Tasks Outsourcing

Monday, April 19, 2021 10:00 am - 10:00 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Please note: This seminar will be given online.

Grace Liu, Postdoctoral Researcher
Cylab, Carnegie Mellon University

To reduce capital and operational costs, many enterprises are outsourcing their networks to third-party providers. Two popular outsourcing models exist today: the first is to outsource network functions (e.g., a firewall) to run on third-party infrastructure such as public clouds; the other is to use in-house infrastructure and only outsource network services (e.g., troubleshooting) to managed service providers. Unfortunately, existing tools for both outsourcing models provide enterprises an “all-or-nothing” solution, where they must have to relinquish control over outsourced components and tasks. While this is convenient in many cases, its lack of transparency and accountability has raised security concerns.

In this talk, I will present my research on designing practical network tasks outsourcing systems with correctness guarantees. First, I will present AuditBox, the first system to audit virtualized network functions. I will show how AuditBox achieves runtime correctness and offline auditability, promoting the outsourcing of network functions for security-sensitive enterprises. Then, I will present Heimdall, a system to enable a fine-grained least-privilege for managed network services, ensuring that untrusted providers comply with an enterprise’s policy goals.


Bio: Guyue (Grace) Liu (http://grace-liu.github.io/) is a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining CMU, She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the George Washington University and B.S. from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. 

Her research has appeared in top networking (e.g., SIGCOMM, NSDI) and systems (e.g, ATC, Middleware) venues, and has gained wide community recognition, including the 2019 EECS Rising Stars, HP Helion OpenStack Scholarship, and RTAS’18 Best Student Paper awards. She was selected as one of the ten N2Women rising stars in networking and communications in 2019. 


To join this seminar on Zoom, please go to https://zoom.us/j/96464728744?pwd=R2RrMnM5SE9nM1Q0NDdFQzJCSklHZz09.