QUIC is widely used on the web and is seen as a successor to TCP, with significant improvements to speed, reliability, and security. However, as IP addresses and ports no longer identify QUIC connections but use Connection Identifiers (CIDs), load balancing becomes challenging. In this work, we introduce two novel attacks for revealing the server count behind QUIC-aware load balancers and breaking the unlinkability guarantees that prevent tracking of structured CIDs. We conducted tests on real-world deployments to assess the feasibility of existing and novel attacks. Our results indicate that our attack is more effective in estimating the number of servers behind load balancers than existing work. Furthermore, the data of our second novel attack suggests that almost all observed load balancers are vulnerable, allowing user tracking across networks. This work also introduces novel countermeasures to mitigate these attacks while being faster than existing approaches for enabling secure load balancing.

Mission-critical systems (MCSs) have evolving latency and reliability requirements, even under challenging conditions such as node and link failures and cyberattacks. To fulfill these requirements, emerging networking technologies like the IEEE 802.1 Time-Sensitive Networking standards provide several protocols for deterministic communication on top of off-the-shelf Ethernet equipment. While Ethernet-based networks offer better configurability than legacy fieldbus systems, they still require the design of adequate topologies for MCSs that fulfill various design objectives such as optimal quality of service and increased resilience against challenges. In this paper, we propose MITHRIL, a multi-objective topology synthesis model with reinforcement learning. It leverages deep reinforcement learning to optimize Ethernet-based topologies in terms of resilience and effectiveness, while adhering to realistic MCS constraints. Our evaluation indicates that MITHRIL enhances the failure and attack tolerance of network topologies while reducing the associated costs, compared to well-connected topologies and other heuristics from the literature.

In the digital age, cyber-threats are a growing concern for individuals, businesses, and governments alike. These threats can range from data breaches and identity theft to large-scale attacks on critical infrastructure. The consequences of such attacks can be severe, leading to financial losses, threats to national security, and the loss of lives. This paper presents a holistic approach to increase the security of critical infrastructures. For that, we propose an open, self-configurable, and AI-based automated cyber-defense platform that runs on specifically hardened devices and own hardware, can be deeply embedded in critical infrastructures and provides full visibility on network, endpoints, and software. In this paper, starting from a thorough analysis of related work, we describe the vision of our SOVEREIGN platform in the form of an architecture, discuss individual building blocks, and evaluate it qualitatively with respect to our requirements.

Attack-resilience is essential to maintain continuous service availability in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) where critical tasks are carried out. In this paper, we address the problem of service outage due to attacks on the edge network and propose an attack-resilient mapping of vehicles to edge nodes that host different types of service instances considering resource efficiency and delay. The distribution of service requests (of an attack-affected edge node) to multiple attack-free edge nodes is performed with an optimal vehicle-to-edge (V2E) mapping. The optimal mapping aims to improve the user experience with minimal delay while considering fair usage of edge capacities and balanced load upon a failure over different edge nodes. The proposed mapping solution is used within a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based framework to effectively deal with the dynamism in service requests and vehicle mobility. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mapping approach through extensive simulation results using real-world vehicle mobility datasets from three cities.

In this work, we investigate an online service management problem in vehicular edge computing networks. To satisfy the varying service demands of mobile vehicles, a service management framework is required to make decisions on the service lifecycle to maintain good network performance. We describe the service lifecycle consists of creating an instance of a given service (scale-out), moving an instance to a different edge node (migration), and/or termination of an underutilized instance (scale-in). In this paper, we propose an efficient online algorithm to perform service management in each time slot, where performance quality in the current time slot, the service demand in future time slots, and the minimal observed delay by vehicles and the minimal migration delay are considered while making the decisions on service lifecycle. Here, the future service demand is computed from a gated recurrent unit (GRU)based prediction model, and the network performance quality is estimated using a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model which has the ability to interact with the vehicular environment in real-time. The choice of optimal edge location to deploy a service instance at different times is based on our proposed optimization formulations. Simulation experiments using real-world vehicle trajectories are carried out to evaluate the performance of our proposed demand-prediction based online service management (DOSM) framework against different state-of-the-art solutions using several performance metrics.

Achieving network resilience in terms of attack tolerance and service availability is critically important for Internet of Vehicles (IoV) networks where vehicles require assistance in sensitive and safety-critical applications like driving. It is particularly challenging in time-varying conditions of IoV traffic. In this paper, we study an attack-resilient optimal service placement problem to ensure disruption-free service availability to the users in edge-enabled IoV network. Our work aims to improve the user experience while minimizing the delay and simultaneously considering efficient utilization of limited edge resources. First, an optimal service placement is performed while considering traffic dynamicity and meeting the service requirements with the use of a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. Next, an optimal secondary mapping and service recovery placements are performed to account for the attacks/failures at the edge. The use of DRL framework helps to adapt to dynamically varying IoV traffic and service demands. In this work, we develop three integer linear programming (ILP) models and use them in the DRL based framework to provide attack-resilient service placement and ensure service availability with efficient network performance. Extensive numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The growth of fifth-generation (5G) and edge computing has enabled the emergence of Internet of Vehicles (IoV). It supports different types of services with different resource and service requirements. However, limited resources at the edge, high mobility of vehicles, increasing demand, and dynamicity in service request types have made service placement a challenging task. A typical static placement solution is not effective as it does not consider the traffic mobility and service dynamics. Handling dynamics in IoV for service placement is an important and challenging problem which is the primary focus of our work in this article. We propose a deep reinforcement learning-based dynamic service placement (DRLD-SP) framework with the objective of minimizing the maximum edge resource usage and service delay while considering the vehicle’s mobility, varying demand, and dynamics in the requests for different types of services. We use SUMO and MATLAB to carry out simulation experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed DRLD-SP approach is effective and outperforms other static and dynamic placement approaches.

The emergence of technologies such as 5G and mobile edge computing has enabled provisioning of different types of services with different resource and service requirements to the vehicles in a vehicular network. The growing complexity of traffic mobility patterns and dynamics in the requests for different types of services has made service placement a challenging task. A typical static placement solution is not effective as it does not consider the traffic mobility and service dynamics. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based dynamic (RL-Dynamic) service placement framework to find the optimal placement of services at the edge servers while considering the vehicle’s mobility and dynamics in the requests for different types of services. We use SUMO and MATLAB to carry out simulation experiments. In our learning framework, for the decision module, we consider two alternative objective functions - minimizing delay and minimizing edge server utilization. We developed an integer linear programming (ILP) based problem formulation for the two objective functions. The experimental results show that 1) compared to static service placement, RL-based dynamic service placement achieves fair utilization of edge server resources and low service delay; and 2) compared to delay-optimized placement, server utilization-optimized placement utilizes resources more effectively, achieving higher fairness with lower edge-server utilization.