Dirk Kutscher

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Managing Radio Networks in an Encrypted World

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I attended last week's IAB/GSMA Workshop on Managing Radio Networks in an Encrypted World (MaRNEW).

The motivation for this workshop was the increasing trend of applying transport layer end-to-end encryption in major web applications such as Google services, YouTube, Netflix, Facebook and others. This trend will likely increase due to further deployment of HTTP/2 for which client implementations today try to setup TLS connections per default.

In mobile networks, traffic management but also additional services/functions have traditionally relied on being able to leverage knowledge about application type, application specifics. Example for such functions include policing/prioritization, optimized scheduling, caching, filtering, but also tracking, ad-insertion etc. In addition to functions that operators want to apply, there are also regulation requirements (depending on local legislation) for filtering, legal intercepting etc. that would become more difficult in the presence of ubiquitous encryption.

At the MaRNEW workshop, leading experts from network operators, vendors, application service providers, CDN providers and academic institutions discussed the impact of ubiquitous encryption as well as ideas for enabling an effective collaboration between the network, applications and users to enable optimal performance and resource efficiency.

In particular, the workshop addressed the following topics:

  • Understanding the bandwidth optimization use cases particular to radio networks;
  • Understanding existing approaches and how these do not work with encrypted traffic;
  • Understanding reasons why the Internet has not standardised support for legal interception and why mobile networks have;
  • Determining how to match traffic types with bandwidth optimization methods;
  • Discussing minimal information to be shared to manage networks but ensure user security and privacy;
  • Developing new bandwidth optimization techniques and protocols within these new constraints;
  • Discussing the appropriate network layer(s) for each management function; and
  • Cooperative methods of bandwidth optimization and issues associated with these.

Encryption: Technological and Business Aspects

It is not a secret that there are different aspects for discussing end-to-end encryption in public networks. Obviously, encryption helps with user privacy, and with the background of recent and current revelations of privacy breaches through pervasive monitoring, it has become common agreement that more (easily deployable) encryption would be useful to overcome this.

There is however also the business perspective: the Internet and specifically the eco system of mobile communication and service provision has multiple stake holders, each of those with their particular interests: network operators want to provide a useful service, in an economical way and may have an interest to enhance the overall service quality through various technical measures. Application service providers want their particular service to perform well over a range of different networks. Network equipment vendors have their product roadmaps and network architecture preferences etc.

Finally, there are the actual users of the system who have an interest in good quality of experience, cost-efficiency -- and privacy. Privacy is not only a concern with respect to (illegal) pervasive monitoring by agencies, but also with respect to maintaining anonymity and confidentiality towards network and service providers. For many applications, user profiles, user-generated data etc. is also a key business asset -- so there is a strong interest by different players to either get access to that data -- or (depending on the nature of a player) to keep other players from accessing it -- through encryption.

The MaRNEW workshop focused on the technological discussion.

Impact of Encryption

During the discussion the following main impacts of ubiquitous encryption on mobile network were identified:

  • Traditional ways of identifying and classifying network traffic (DPI) become more costly and potentially infeasible.
  • Traditional traffic management systems have relied on such classification, for different purpose: optimizing resource usage in access networks according to operator policies, forwarding of traffic through optimizers, caches etc., as well as filtering. Those approaches and the actual requirements behind them need to be revisited.
  • Content and service provisioning in both mobile and fixed networks today is heavily relying on CDN and in-network application functions. In addition, new approaches such as Mobile Edge Computing may shift more of such functions to access networks. The motivation is to provide better performance and cost efficiency through offloading networks (CDN cache hits) and through reducing latency and transport protocol performance (local control loops, reduced RTT to caches). Introducing more and more end-to-end encryption makes it impossible for operators to provide any application (or CDN-provider)-independent optimization functions. The alternative of running individual instances for each individual CDN provider does not seem promising. It could also be a major road block for future network and application innovation -- because each of those individual functions might require upgrading to introduce in-network support for it.

Way Forward

cooperative-traffic-management

 

(Copyright 2015 NEC)

At the workshop, different solutions were discussed.

  • First, it was agreed that the actual impact needs to be understood better and ought to be quantified. For example, assuming that some knowledge about application types (or corresponding service quality expectations) could be leveraged by base stations for more efficient transmission scheduling (e.g., by delaying packets of non-latency-sensitive flows or by operating multiple queues for different flow types), networks should at least be able to obtain corresponding hints from senders. However, the actual impact and potential benefits have to be demonstrated. Operators will work on that issue.
  • The (Internet) transport protocol community has made significant progress in recent years on several fronts: Active Queue Management (AQM) such as fq_codel and PIE have been demonstrated to be able to improve load balancing and reduce latency in router queues. Moreover, transport protocol research has led to promising results (for example PCC -- Performance-oriented Congestion Control). It was suggested that those mechanisms should be implemented and deployed where possible.
  • Several options for Cooperative Traffic Management have been discussed. For example this could included exchanging certain information between the network and senders/receivers. The network could inform endpoints better about congestion and non-congestion-induced problems (for example in an extended ECN fashion), or endpoints could inform the network about relevant meta information (application type, QoS requirements etc.). The latter could leverage existing technologies such as DiffServ. Potentially, it would be sufficient to distinguish delay-sensitive flows (e.g., for interactive real-time) and delay-tolerant flows (file download etc.). One interesting question is how endpoints would be incentivized to use such signaling correctly and how corresponding APIs would look like.
  • Overcoming the general limitations of connection-based security and its tendency to require application-specific (or CDN-provider-specific) in-network functions could require a more fundamental rethinking of network architecture and protocol layering. For example, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) would leverage object-security (authentication, encryption), hence enabling the network to implement functions such as caching, local transport strategies etc. in an application manner. This could be of particular relevance for 5G networks where a higher level of dynamicity in the creation and deployment of new OTT services are expected.

For the discussion of such solutions, I (together with several colleagues) have made two contributions to the workshop: 1) Enabling Traffic Management without DPI, and 2) Maintaining Efficiency and Privacy in Mobile Networks through Information-Centric Networking.

Enabling Traffic Management without DPI

Is DPI really needed for traffic management in mobile networks? Our position is “no”. Traffic management is usually realized through relatively simple mechanisms like rate shaping, prioritization, and dropping packets. Compared to these mechanisms, the semantics of applications that can be exposed through DPI are much richer; traffic classification anyway maps these semantics down to a simple set of categories.

The question then arises whether operators are really helped by brittle, insecure and expensive mechanisms for gaining higher fidelity information for the coarse traffic information for traffic management, or whether simple signaling would suffice for traffic classification for mobile network management purposes.

Obviously, when relying on endpoints to signal information about the underlying application which may be used to change the network’s treatment of that application’s traffic, questions of trust arise: how can the network be sure the endpoints are being honest, and prevent endpoints from gaming the system to their advantage (and the disadvantage of others); can these signaling approaches be used as an attack vector. Here the approach is to define the vocabulary of the signaling protocol to properly incentivize honest cooperation, while allowing the network to verify this cooperation.

We discuss two application-independent approaches for traffic management that are based on network-compatible metrics: ConEx Policing and low latency support with SPUD.


Congestion Exposure (ConEx) is a mechanism that enables senders to inform the network about previously encountered congestion in flows thus enabling senders and network infrastructure to respond to congestion based on operator policies. This information is provided in the IP header and can still be accessed even if the payload is encrypted. ConEx information is auditable by comparing the congestion level at network egress to the ConEx signal which incentivizes the sender to state its congestion contribution correctly.

Using ConEx would allow for a bulk packet traffic management system that does not have to consider application classes. Instead, with ConEx accurate downstream path information on incipient congestion are visible to ingress network operators. This information can be used to base traffic management on the actual current cost (which is the contribution to congestion of each flow) and enable operators to apply congestion-based policing/accounting depending on their preference and independent of application characteristics. Such traffic management would be simpler, more robust (no real-time flow application type identification required, no static configuration of application classes) and provide better performance as decisions can be taken based on the real actual cost contribution at each point in time.

The Substrate Protocol for User Datagrams (SPUD) is a new approach to selective information exposure designed to support transport evolution. SPUD is realized as a shim between UDP and an (encrypted) transport protocol. The basic SPUD protocol provides minimal sub-transport functionality by grouping of packets together into tubes and signaling of the start and end of a tube.

This will assist middleboxes in state setup and teardown along the path. Further, SPUD provides an extensible signaling mechanism based on a type-value encoding for associating properties with individual packets or all packets in a tube. The SPUD protocol can be used to signal low latency requirements from an endpoint to the network, or expose the existence of support for such services from the network to the endpoint. Therefore we propose to provide four SPUD signals: a latency sensitivity flag, a signal to yield to another tube, an application preference for a maximum single queue delay, and a facility to discover the maximum possible single queue length along the path.

Based on the latency-sensitivity flag a network operator can implement an additional service (as compared to today’s best effort service) that uses smaller queues and/or different AQM parameters without changing the service that is provided today. Signaling of lower queue priority or maximum single hop delay can further be used to preferentially drop packets of the same sender or within one flow. Information about expected queuing delays on the path can be used for buffer configuration at the endpoints.

The proposal is not intended as a blueprint for immediate implementation -- but it demonstrates how cooperative traffic management could be implemented. In our view, cooperative traffic management requires a solid understanding of the interactions with transport layer and the corresponding performance impacts/improvements.

Maintaining Efficiency and Privacy in Mobile Networks through Information-Centric Networking

We present a solution to overcome the impasse of deploying confidentiality at the cost of breaking most of current network traffic engineering in mobile networks. Our proposition is based on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) which is a data-centric network architecture that gracefully incorporates security and traffic optimization.

Content-based security instead of connection based is the foundation of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture. In ICN, we provide a network service that directly implements the desired information-access abstraction. The network forwards requests for named data and corresponding responses containing the data. The name can be cryptographically bound to the data for ascertaining authenticity. This enables the network to replicate data objects in arbitrary locations, thus enabling ubiquitous caching. Object data can also be encrypted for user privacy, leaving other network-relevant information such as the name intact – thus maintaining options for traffic management, policing etc. The performance gains of having ICN in the mobile backhaul have been evaluated experimentally (see paper). ICN incorporates these ideas into a novel network layer providing all of the mentioned objectives without using man-in-the-middle like solutions.

ICN secures data itself by requiring producers to cryptographically sign every data packet: the signature constitutes the integrity meta-data. The data is uniquely identified by a name that is bound to the data via the signature. The producer’s public key to implement signature verification can be obtained by using the KeyLocator field which can be the name of the data containing the key of the producer. Authentication is implemented via the producer’s key that makes use of a trust model, e.g. PKI, Web-of-Trust that can be extended using key chaining to delegate trust to different sub-namespaces (for hierarchical naming). Confidentiality is obtained by encryption of the data payload using the producer’s key. Notice that authenticity, integrity and confidentiality are independent features.

Once data is published by the producer it can be stored in any location without affecting the security properties of the data which are location independent. Inter-networking of encrypted data is included by design in ICN and in-network caching is always possible with or without confidentiality. Authenticity might not be necessary in many cases so the authentication of the identity of the producer is optional. It is not mandatory either to verify the integrity of the data by verification of the signature. It is important to remark that ICN disantangles authenticity, privacy and integrity so that they can be handled in different ways and without the interaction of end-hosts.

TLS provides web security by encrypting a layer 4 connection between two hosts. Authenticity is provided by the web of trust (certification authorities and a public key infrastructure) to authenticate the web server and symmetric cypher on the two end points based on a negotiated key. In presence of TLS many networking operations become unfeasible: filtering, caching, acceleration, trans-coding.

ICN takes a radically different approach to guarantee confidentiality, authenticity and integrity by embedding them into a redefined network layer. Indeed, ICN builds on the abstraction of data requested, accessed, cached and forwarded by name: the network forwards requests coming from the consumer for named data and routes back data packets on the identical reverse path (symmetric routing).

The ICN communication model allows network nodes between a web server and a web client to operate as forwarding and storage functions to implement various inter-networking functionalities like caching or load balancing without relaxing any security feature. As a fully fledged data-centric network architecture, ICN incorporates mobility, storage, security and multi-point communication by design.

Written by dkutscher

September 28th, 2015 at 12:49 am