04 September 2008

September Meeting

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.

More Information