Not applicable.
This invention relates generally to communication networks and more particularly to localizing attacks or failures in communications networks.
As is known in the art, there is a trend to provide communication networks which operate with increasing information capacity. This trend has led to the use of transmission media and components capable of providing information over relatively large signal bandwidths. One type of transmission media capable of providing such bandwidths is an optical carrier transmission media such as glass fibers which are also referred to as optical fibers or more simply fibers.
As is also known, an all-optical network (AON) refers to a network which does not contain electronic processing components. AONs utilize all-optical switching components which afford network functionality and all-optical amplification components which counteract attenuation of the optical signals through the network. Since AONs do not contain electronic processing components, AONs avoid network bottlenecks caused by such electronic processing elements.
Because AONs support delivery of large amounts of information, there is a trend to utilize AONs in those network applications which require communications rates in the range of 1 terabit per second and greater. While network architectures and implementations of AONs vary, substantially all of the architectures and implementations utilize devices or components such as optical switches, couplers, filters, attenuators, circulators and amplifiers. These building block devices are coupled together in particular ways to provide the AONs having particular characteristics.
The devices which perform switching and amplification of optical signals have certain drawbacks. In particular, owing imperfections and necessary physical tolerances associated with fabricating practical components, the components allow so-called xe2x80x9cleakage signalsxe2x80x9d to propagate between signals ports and signal paths of the devices. Ideal device signal paths are ideally isolated from each other. Such leakage signals are often referred to as xe2x80x9ccrosstalk signalsxe2x80x9d and components which exhibit such leakage characteristics, are said to have a xe2x80x9ccrosstalkxe2x80x9d characteristic.
The limitations in the isolation due to the physical properties of switches and amplifiers can be exploited by a nefarious user. In particular, a nefarious user on one signal channel can affect or attack other signal channels having signal paths or routes which share devices with the nefarious user""s channel. Since signals flow unchecked through the AON, the nefarious user may use a legitimate means of accessing the network to effect a service disruption attack, causing a quality of service degradation or outright service denial. The limitations in the operating characteristics of optical components in AONs thus have important security ramifications.
One important security issue for optical networks is that service disruption attacks can propagate through a network. Propagation of attacks results in the occurrence of failures in portions of the network beyond where the attack originated. This is in contrast to failure due to component fatigue. Failures due to component fatigue generally will not propagate through the network but will affect a limited number of nodes and components in the network. Since the mechanisms and consequences of a service disruption attack are different from those of a failure, it is necessary to provide different responses to attacks and failures. Thus, it is important to have the ability to differentiate between a failure and an attack and to have the ability to locate the source of an attack.
Referring to FIG. 1, an example of an attack which propagates through a switch 10 and an amplifier 16 is shown. The switch 10 includes switch ports 10a-10d with a first switch channel 12a provided between switch ports 10a and 10c and a second switch channel 12b provided between switch ports 10b and 10d. The switch 10 has a finite amount of isolation between the first and second switch channels 12a, 12b. Owing to the finite isolation characteristics of the switch 10, a portion of a signal propagating along the first switch channel 12a can be coupled to the second switch channel 12b through a so-called xe2x80x9cleakagexe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9ccrosstalkxe2x80x9d signal path or channel 14. Thus, a crosstalk signal 15 propagates from the first switch channel 12a through the crosstalk channel 14 to the second switch channel 12b. 
The output of the second switch channel 12b is coupled through switch port 10d to an input port 16a of a two-channel amplifier 16. The amplifier receives a second channel 12c at a second amplifier input port 16b. If the crosstalk signal 15 on channel 12b is provided having a particularly high signal level, the crosstalk signal 15 propagating in channel 12b of the amplifier 16 couples power from the signal propagating on the second amplifier channel 12c thereby reducing the signal level of the signal propagating on the channel 12c. This is referred to as a gain competition attack. It should thus be noted that a signal propagating on the first channel 12a can be used to affect the third channel 12c, even though the channels 12a and 12c are routed through distinct components (i.e. channel 12a is routed through the switch 10 and channel 12c is routed through the amplifier 16).
It should also be noted that in this particular example, the gain competition attack was executed via a signal inserted into the channel 12b via the crosstalk channel 14 existent in the switch 10. Thus, a user with a particularly strong signal can couple power from the signals of other uses without directly accessing an amplifier component. With this technique, a nefarious user can disrupt several users who share amplifiers which receive a gain competition signal from the nefarious user via a different component propagating on the channel 12c. 
FIG. 2 illustrates one scenario for the necessity to differentiate an attack carried out by the network traffic from a physical failure and when it is important to be able to localize the source of the attack. In FIG. 2, a portion of a network includes a first network node 17a provided by a first element which here corresponds to a switch 10 and a second network node 17b provided by a second element which here corresponds to a second switch 18. It should be noted that the nodes 17a, 17b are here shown as switches for purposes of illustration only and that in other embodiments, the nodes 17a, 17b may be provided from elements other than switches. In this example, it is assumed that each of the nodes 17a, 17b guards against jamming attacks by pinpointing any channel on which is propagating a signal having a signal level higher than a predetermined threshold level and then disconnecting the channel on which the high level signal propagates.
In FIG. 2, the switch 10 includes switch ports 10a-10d with a first switch channel 12a provided between switch ports 10a and 10c and a second switch channel 12b provided between switch ports 10b and 10d. The switch 10 has a finite amount of isolation between the first and second switch channels 12a, 12b. Channels 12a, 12b both propagate through the node 17a, which in this particular example corresponds to the switch 10a, and both channels 12a, 12b propagate signals having the same carrier signal wavelength. Owing to the finite isolation characteristics between channels 12a, 12b in the switch 10, a portion of a signal propagating along the first switch channel 12a can be coupled to the second switch channel 12b through a crosstalk channel 14. Thus, the crosstalk signal 15 propagates from the first switch channel 12a through the crosstalk channel 14 to the second switch channel 12b. 
If an excessively powerful signal (e.g. one having a signal level equal to or greater than the predetermined threshold level) is introduced via switch port 10a onto channel 12a, then channel 12a will be disconnected. The crosstalk signal 15, however, from channel 12a is superimposed upon channel 12b at node 17a. If the carrier signals on the two channels 12a, 12b have substantially the same wavelength, the signal levels of the two carrier signals may add. Thus, the signal propagating in channel 12b, in turn, may exceed the predetermined threshold signal level.
The crosstalk signal 15 and the carrier signal propagating on channel 12b are coupled to the second switch 18 which is provided having first and second channels 12b, 12c. Switch 18, like switch 10 has a finite amount of isolation between the first and second switch channels 12b, 12c. Channels 12b, 12c both propagate through the same node 17b, which in this particular example corresponds to the switch 18. Furthermore, signals propagating on the channels 12b, 12c have substantially the same carrier signal wavelength. Owing to the finite isolation characteristic of the switch 18, a portion of the signal propagating along the channel 12b can be coupled to the second switch channel 12c through a crosstalk channel 20. Thus, the crosstalk signal 15 propagates from the first switch channel 12b through the crosstalk channel 20 to the second switch channel 12b resulting in a second crosstalk signal 21 propagating on the channel 12c. 
Since the carrier signals propagating in channels 12a, 12b and 12c each have substantially the same wavelength, if the amplitude of the crosstalk signal is sufficiently large, disruption of the signals propagating on the channel 12c can occur.
In this case both nodes 17a, 17b may correctly recognize the failure as a crosstalk jamming attack. Node 17a will correctly ascertain that the offending channel is channel 12a but node 17b will ascertain the offending channel as channel 12b. If the network has no means of localizing the source of the attack, then node 17a will disconnect channel 12a and node 17b will disconnect channel 12b. Channel 12b will, therefore, have been erroneously disconnected. Thus, to allow the network to properly recover from attacks, it is necessary to ascertain attacks carried out by network traffic and to localize the source of these attacks.
In networks having relatively high data transmission rates, ultrafast restoration is typically preplanned and based upon local information (i.e. information local to a network node). The restoration route is generally stored in a memory device within the network nodes. This approach avoids the delays associated with dynamically computing routes once a failure occurs. To utilize such a pre-planned or pre-stored approach, it is thus necessary to store the alternate route information at each of the network nodes.
As explained above in conjunction with FIG. 2, the techniques for responding to signal transmission problems due to a failure which occurs because of natural fatigue of components or physical sabotage of the network are not well suited to responding to signal transmission problems caused by the signals themselves. For example, one technique for recovering from a node failure (i.e. a failure due to natural fatigue of components or physical sabotage of the network) is to reroute traffic away from the failed node. This technique is used in synchronous optical networks (SONET) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) bidirectional self-healing rings (SHRS). In a SONET/SDH bidirectional SHR, if the traffic itself is the cause of the failure, as is the case in the amplifier and switch attacks discussed above, then failures may be caused throughout the network without any restoration.
Another technique for recovering from a failure is to localize component failures. Once the failed components are localized, they can be physically removed from the network and repaired or replaced with other components. One problem with this technique, however, is that it results in service degradation or denial while the failed component or components are being identified and repaired or replaced. Another problem with this technique is that it may take a relatively long period of time before the failed component or components can be identified and repaired or replaced. Furthermore, since each failed component must be physically located and repaired or replaced, further time delays can be incurred.
Thus, if techniques intended to respond to naturally occurring failures are applied to cases of service disruption attacks in AONs, an attack at a single point can lead to widespread failures within the network. It is, therefore, important to be able to ascertain whether an attack is caused by traffic itself or from a failure which occurs because of natural fatigue of components or physical sabotage of the network.
For example, assume there is an attack on a node i, which carries channels 1, 2 and 3, from channel 1. If a network management system deals with all failures as though they were benign failures (e.g. a failure due to component fatigue), then the network management system assumes that node i failed of its own accord and reroutes the three channels to some other node, say node j. After that rerouting, node j will appear as having failed because channel 2 will attack node j. The network may then reroute all three channels to node k, and so on. Therefore, it is important for node i under attack to be able to recognize an attack coming from its traffic stream and to differentiate it from a physical hardware failure which is not due to the traffic streams traversing node i.
Attacks such as the amplifier and switch attacks discussed above can lead to service denial. The ability to use attacks to deny service stems from the fact that attacks can spread, causing malfunctions at several locations, whereas failures generally do not disrupt the operation of several devices. Thus, while a single network element failure may cause several network elements to have corrupted inputs and outputs, the failure will not generally cause other network elements to be defective in their operation.
In view of the above, it has been recognized that since the results of component failures and attacks are often similar (e.g. improper operation of one or more network components or nodes), the difference is transparent to a network node or system user. Because of this transparency there is no absolute metric to determine whether an input is faulty or not. Instead, it is necessary to examine the operation of a node, i.e., the relation between the input and the output. A failure will lead to incorrect operation of the node. An attack, as illustrated above in conjunction with FIGS. 1 and 2, can cause network elements not only to have corrupted inputs and outputs, but the nature of those corrupted inputs can lead to improper operation of the network elements themselves. Hence, if alarms are raised at individual network elements by improper operation of the network element, a fault will lead to a single alarm. An attack, on the other hand, may lead to alarms in several nodes downstream (in the flow of communications) of the first node or network point which is attacked. Thus, if a restoration scheme is prepared to recover from failures but encounters instead an attack, the restoration scheme itself may malfunction and cause failures.
FIGS. 3, 3A illustrate SONET/SDH approaches to recovery schemes. These recovery schemes are based on rings. SONET/SDH, allow for network restoration after failure using two techniques illustrated respectively in FIGS. 3 and 3A.
Referring now to FIG. 3 a ring 24 having network nodes 24a-24e utilizes a recovery technique typically referred to as automatic protection switching (APS). The APS technique utilizes two streams 26a, 26b which traverse physically node or link disjoint paths between a source and a destination. In this particular example, stream 26a couples a source node 24a to a destination node 24d with information flowing in a clockwise direction through intermediate nodes 24b, 24c. Stream 26b, on the other hand, couples the source node 24a to destination node 24d with information flowing in a counterclockwise direction through intermediate node 24e. In case of failure of a node or link along one of the streams, e.g. stream 26a, the receiving node listens to the redundant, backup, stream e.g. stream 26b. Such a technique is used in the SONET unidirectional path switched ring (UPSR) systems.
Referring now to FIG. 3A a ring 28 having network nodes 28a-28e utilizes a recovery technique typically referred to as loopback protection. In the loopback approach, in case of a failure, a single stream 29a is rerouted onto a backup channel 29b. Such an approach is used in the SONET bidirectional line switched ring (BLSR).
For any node or edge redundant graph, there exists a pair of node or edge-disjoint paths, that can be used for APS, between any two nodes. Automatic protection switching over arbitrary redundant networks need not restrict itself to two paths between every pair of nodes, but can instead be performed with trees, which are more bandwidth efficient for multicast traffic. For loopback protection, most of the schemes have relied on interconnection of rings or on finding ring covers in networks. Loopback can also be performed on arbitrary redundant networks.
FIGS. 4 and 4A, in which like elements are provided having like reference designations, the manner in which a single attack may lead to service disruption in the case of loopback recovery is shown.
Referring briefly to FIG. 4 a portion of a network 30 includes network nodes j, k. For purposes of illustration, assume node j is the attack source (i.e. node j is attacked, for instance by a nefarious user using node j as a point of entry into the network for insertion of a spurious jamming signal).
The jamming signal causes the nodes adjacent to node j to infer that node j has failed, or is xe2x80x9cdown.xe2x80x9d The same jamming signal, upon traveling to node k, will cause the nodes adjacent to node k to infer that node k has failed. If both nodes j and k are considered as individual failures by a network management system, then loopback will be performed to bypass both nodes j and k in a ring. Thus, all traffic which passed through both nodes j and k will be disrupted, as indicated by path 31 in FIG. 4 by the loopback at each of the nodes j, k.
Referring now to FIG. 4A, if node j is correctly localized as the source of the attack, then loopback effected to bypass node j will lead to correct operation of the network, with only the inevitable loss of traffic which had node j as its destination or origination. Traffic which traversed node j from node i is backhauled through node j. Thus, by correctly localizing the source of an attack, the amount of traffic which is lost can be reduced.
Briefly, and in general overview, work in the area of fault localization in current data networks can be summarized and categorized as three different sets of fault diagnosis frameworks: (1) fault diagnosis for computing networks; (2) probabilistic fault diagnosis by alarm correlation; and (3) fault diagnosis methods specific to AONs.
The fault diagnosis framework for computing networks covers those cases in which units communicate with subsets of other units for testing. In this approach, each unit is permanently either faulty or operational. The test on a unit to determine whether it is faulty or operational is reliable only for operational units. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the testing structure for establishing each unit as faulty or operational as long as the total number of faulty elements is under some bound are known in the art. Polynomial-time algorithms for identifying faults in diagnosable systems have been used. Instead of being able to determine exactly the faulty units, another approach has been to determine the most likely fault set.
All of the above techniques have several drawbacks. First, they require each unit to be fixed as either faulty or operational. Hence, sporadic attacks which may only temporarily disable a unit cannot be handled by the above approaches. Thus, the techniques are not robust. Second, the techniques require tests to be carefully designed and sequentially applied. Moreover, the number of tests required rises with the possible number of faults. Thus, it is relatively difficult to scale the techniques. Third, the tests do not establish any type of causality among failures and thus the tests cannot establish the source of an attack by observing other attacks. The techniques, therefore, do not allow network nodes to operate with only local information. Fourth, fault diagnosis by many successive test experiments may not be rapid enough to perform automatic recovery.
The probabilistic fault diagnosis approaches for performing fault localization in networks typically utilize a Bayesian analysis of alarms in networks. In this approach, alarms from different network nodes are collected centrally and analyzed to determine the most probable failure scenario. Unlike the fault diagnosis for computing networks techniques, the Bayesian analysis techniques can be used to discover the source(s) of attacks thus enabling automatic recovery. Moreover, the Bayesian analysis techniques can analyze a wide range of time-varying attacks and thus these techniques are relatively robust. All of the above results, however, assume some degree of centralized processing of alarms, usually at the network and subnetwork level. Thus, one problem with this technique is that an increase in the size of the network leads to a concomitant increase in the time and complexity of the processing required to perform fault localization.
Another problem with the Bayesian analysis techniques is that there are delays involved with propagation of the messages to the processing locations. In networks having a relatively small number of processing locations, the delays are relatively small. In network""s having a relatively large number of processing locations, however, the delays may be relatively long and thus the Bayesian analysis techniques may be relatively slow. Thus the Bayesian analysis techniques may not scale well as network data rates increase or as the size of the network increases. If either the data rate or the span of network increase, there is a growth in the latency of the network, i.e. the number of bits in flight in the network. The combined increase in processing delay and in latency implies that many bits may be beyond the reach of corrective measures by the time attacks are detected. Therefore, an increase in network span and data rate would lead to an exacerbation of the problem of insufficiently rapid detection.
For AONs, fault diagnosis and related network management issues have been considered. Some of the management issues for other high-speed electro-optic networks are also applicable. The problem of spreading of fault alarms, which exists for several types of communication networks, is exacerbated in AONs by the fact that signals flow through AONs without being processed. To address faults only due to fiber failure, only the nodes adjacent to the failed fiber need to find out about the failure and a node need only switch from one fiber to another. For failures which occur in a chain of in-line repeaters which do not have the capability to switch from one fiber to another, one approach is when a failure occurs, the alarm due to the failure is generated by the in-line repeater immediately after the link failure. The failure alarm then travels down to a node which can perform failure diagnostic. The failure alarms generated downstream of the first failure are masked by using upstream precedence. Failure localization can then be accomplished by having the node capable of diagnostics send messages over a supervisory channel towards the source of the failure until the failure is localized and an alarm is generated at the first repeater after a failure. These techniques require diagnostic operations to be performed by remote nodes and to have two-way communications between nodes.
It would, therefore, be desirable to provide a technique for stopping an attack on a signal channel by a nefarious user which does not result in service degradation or denial. It would also be desirable to provide a technique for localizing an attack on a network. It would further be desirable to provide a relatively robust, scalable technique which localizes rapidly the source of an attack in a network and allows rapid, automatic recovery in the network.
In accordance with the present invention, a distributed method for performing attack localization in a network having a plurality of nodes includes the steps of (a) determining, at each of the plurality of nodes in the network, if there is an attack on the node; (b) transmitting one or more messages using local communication between first and second nodes wherein a first one of the nodes is upstream from a second one of the nodes and wherein each of the one or more messages indicates that the node transmitting the message detected an attack at the message transmitting node; and (c) processing messages received in a message processing one of the first and second nodes to determine if the message processing node is first node to sustain an attack on a certain channel. With this particular arrangement, a technique for finding the origin of an attacking signal is provided. By processing node status information at each node in the network and generating responses based on the node status information and the messages received by the node, the technique can be used to determine whether an attack is caused by network traffic or by failure of a network element or component. In this manner, an attack on the network can be localized. By localizing the attack, the network maintains quality of service. Furthermore, while the technique of the present invention is particularly useful for localization of propagating attacks, the technique will also localize component failures which can be viewed as non-propagating attacks. The technique can be applied to perform loopback restoration as well as automatic protection switching (APS). Thus, a technique provides a means for utilizing attack localization with a loopback recovery technique or an APS technique to avoid unnecessary service denial. The nodes include a response processor which processes incoming messages and local node status information to determine the response of the node. The particular response of each node depends upon a variety of factors including but not limited to the particular type of network, the particular type of recovery scheme (e.g. loopback or automatic protection switching), the particular type of network application and the particular goal (e.g. raise an alarm, reroute the node immediately before and/or after the attacked node in the network, etc . . . ).
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds