Disseminating Security Updates at Internet Scale

by Jun Li, Peter Reiher, Gerald J. Popek

Overview

Disseminating Security Updates at Internet Scale describes a new system, "Revere", that addresses these problems. "Revere" builds large-scale, self-organizing and resilient overlay networks on top of the Internet to push security updates from dissemination centers to individual nodes. "Revere" also sets up repository servers for individual nodes to pull missed security updates. This book further discusses how to protect this push-and-pull dissemination procedure and how to secure "Revere" overlay networks, considering possible attacks and countermeasures. Disseminating Security Updates at Internet Scale presents experimental measurements of a prototype implementation of "Revere" gathered using a large-scale oriented approach. These measurements suggest that "Revere" can deliver security updates at the required scale, speed and resiliency for a reasonable cost.

Disseminating Security Updates at Internet Scale will be helpful to those trying to design peer systems at large scale when security is a concern, since many of the issues faced by these designs are also faced by "Revere". The "Revere" solutions may not always be appropriate for other peer systems with very different goals, but the analysis of the problems and possible solutions discussed here will be helpful in designing a customized approach for such systems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781402073052
Publisher:	Springer US
Publication date:	11/30/2002
Series:	Advances in Information Security , #8
Edition description:	2003
Pages:	157
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 1.1 Case Studies.- 1.2 Goal of Revere.- 1.3 Assumptions.- 1.4 Challenges.- 1.5 Revere Overview.- 1.6 Key Contributions of This Research.- 1.7 Roadmap of This Book.- 2. Assurance via Redundancy.- 2.1 The Redundancy Approach.- 2.2 Interruption Threats.- 2.3 Transmission Primitives.- 2.4 Assurance via Redundancy.- 2.5 Employing Redundancy in Revere.- 2.6 Conclusions.- 3. RBone: A Self-Organized Resilient Overlay Network.- 3.1 Principles for Building an RBone.- 3.2 RBone Formation.- 3.3 Adaptive Management of RBone.- 3.4 Messages and Data Structures.- 3.5 Building a Common RBone.- 3.6 Conclusions.- 4. Dissemination Procedure.- 4.1 Dissemination Principle.- 4.2 Dissemination Center.- 4.3 Security Update Format.- 4.4 Pushing: A Store-And-Forward Mechanism.- 4.5 Pulling Security Updates.- 4.6 Open Issues.- 4.7 Conclusions.- 5. Security.- 5.1 Assumptions.- 5.2 Security of Dissemination Procedure.- 5.3 Securely Building and Maintaining RBones.- 5.4 Attacks and Countermeasures.- 5.5 Open Issues.- 5.6 Conclusions.- 6. Real Measurement Under Virtual Topology.- 6.1 Metrics.- 6.2 Overloading Approach.- 6.3 Measurement Procedure.- 6.4 Results and Analysis.- 6.5 Open Issues.- 6.6 Conclusions.- 7. Related Work.- 7.1 General-Purpose Distribution Services.- 7.2 Special-Purpose Distribution Services.- 7.3 Information Delivery Structures.- 7.4 Security.- 7.5 Conclusions.- 8. Future Work.- 8.1 Open Issues Discussed in Previous Chapters.- 8.2 Think More Beyond Today.- 9. Conclusions.- 9.1 Summary of the Problem.- 9.2 The Revere Solution.- 9.3 Contributions of Revere.- 9.4 Broad Lessons.- 9.5 Final Comments.- References.