Publications

2022

1. CertRevoke: A Certificate Revocation Framework for Named Data Networking

   Tianyuan Yu, Hongcheng Xie, Siqi Liu, Xinyu Ma, Xiaohua Jia, and Lixia Zhang

   In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking 2022

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   Named Data Networking (NDN) secures network communications by requiring all data packets to be signed upon production. This requirement makes usable and efficient NDN certificate issuance and revocation essential for NDN operations. In this paper, we first investigate and clarify core concepts related to NDN certificate revocation, then proceed with the design of CertRevoke, an NDN certificate revocation framework. CertRevoke utilizes naming conventions and trust schema to ensure certificate owners and issuers legitimately produce in-network cacheable records for revoked certificates. We evaluate the security properties and performance of CertRevoke through case studies. Our results show that deploying CertRevoke in an operational NDN network is feasible.

2. Building a Secure MHealth Data Sharing Infrastructure over NDN

   Saurab Dulal, Nasir Ali, Adam Robert Thieme, Tianyuan Yu, Siqi Liu, Suravi Regmi, Lixia Zhang, and Lan Wang

   In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking 2022

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   Exploratory efforts in mobile health (mHealth) data collection and sharing have achieved promising results. However, fine-grained contextual access control and real-time data sharing are two of the remaining challenges in enabling temporally-precise mHealth intervention. We have developed an NDN-based system called mGuard to address these challenges. mGuard provides a pub-sub API to let users subscribe to real-time mHealth data streams, and uses name-based access control policies and key-policy attribute-based encryption to grant fine-grained data access to authorized users based on contextual information. We evaluate mGuard’s performance using sample data from the MD2K project.

2021

1. NDN-MPS: Supporting Multiparty Authentication over Named Data Networking

   Zhiyi Zhang, Siqi Liu, Randy King, and Lixia Zhang

   In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking 2021

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   Modern digitally controlled systems require multiparty authentication to meet the security requirements. This paper describes the design and development of NDN-MPS, an automated solution to support multiparty signing and verification for NDN-enabled applications. NDN-MPS proposes three basic changes to the existing NDN security solutions. First, it introduces a new type of trust schema that supports the semantics for multiparty singing and verification. Second, it extends the NDN signing process design to accommodate multisignature schemes such as BLS signature and to ensure the data consistency across signers. Third, NDN-MPS provides options for different application scenarios to coordinate the joint signing process of multiple signers. We evaluate NDN-MPS by assessing its security properties and measuring its performance. Our results show that NDN-MPS provides resistance against different types of attacks and is practical to be deployed.

2. Mnemosyne: An Immutable Distributed Logging Framework over Named Data Networking

   Siqi Liu, Philipp Moll, and Lixia Zhang

   In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking 2021

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   This poster describes the design of Mnemosyne, a distributed logger running over Named Data Networking. Mnemosyne utilizes proof of authenticity instead of proof of work. It assures immutability of logged events by interlocking all event records in a DAG mesh. By using a distributed design, Mnemosyne provides both a high logging throughput and system resiliency in face of network component failures.

3. Designing Hydra with Centralized versus Decentralized Control: A Comparative Study

   Siqi Liu, Varun Patil, Tianyuan Yu, Alexander Afanasyev, Frank Alex Feltus, Susmit Shannigrahi, and Lixia Zhang

   In Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on (de) Centralization in the Internet 2021

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   Today’s networked and distributed applications, by and large, rely on cloud services. However, solely cloud-based services are not the ideal solution for all use cases, in particular, the case of high volume data sharing in scientific computing whose cloud usage costs could be prohibitively high. Thus we take on a task of building a distributed, federated data repository, dubbed Hydra, for sharing large volume scientific data. In this paper, we compare two design choices: designing Hydra over TCP/IP with a centralized controller, and designing Hydra over Named Data Network (NDN) to enable distributed control. Our study shows that (i) building Hydra over TCP/IP with a central controller offers a simple, straightforward design; (ii) however, the controller necessarily needs to be replicated for scalability and reliability, and cloud CDN is needed to scale data delivery, both bringing additional complexity into the overall design; and (iii) building Hydra over NDN automatically offers scalable and efficient data dissemination at volume, as well as enables distributed control with high resiliency.

4. Drug-Target Interaction Prediction with Graph Attention networks

   Haiyang Wang, Guangyu Zhou, Siqi Liu, Jyun-Yu Jiang, and Wei Wang

   2021

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