CSE 600 Talk: Securing Software-Defined Networking Infrastructure by Dr. Guofei Gu

ABSTRACT: Today’s network and computing infrastructure rests on inadequate foundations. An emerging, promising new foundation for computing is software-defined infrastructure (SDI), which offers a range of 
technologies including: compute, storage and network virtualization; novel separation of concerns at the systems level; and new approaches to system and device management. As a representative example of SDI, 
software-defined networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm that decouples the control logic from the closed and proprietary implementations of traditional network data plane infrastructure. SDN is now becoming the networking foundation for data-center/cloud, future Internet and 5G infrastructures. 

We believe that SDN is an impactful technology to drive a variety of innovations in network management and security. It is now clear that security will be a top concern, as well as a new killer app, for SDN. In this talk, I will discuss some new opportunities, as well as challenges, in this new direction and demonstrate with our recent 
research results. I will discuss how SDN can enhance network security. And I will also discuss some unique new security problems inside SDN and introduce some of our work to enhance the security of SDN. Finally, I will share my vision on programmable system security in a software-defined world. 

BIO: Dr. Guofei Gu is a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU). Before coming to Texas A&M, he received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the College 
of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are in network and systems security. 
Dr. Gu is a recipient of 2010 NSF CAREER Award, 2013 AFOSR Young Investigator Award, 2010 IEEE S&P Best Student Paper Award, 2015 ICDCS Best Paper Award, Texas A&M Dean of Engineering Excellence Award, 
Presidential Impact Fellow, Charles H. Barclay Jr. '45 Faculty Fellow and the Google Faculty Research Award. He is an active member of the security research community and has pioneered several new research directions such as botnet detection/defense and SDN security. Dr. Gu has served on the program committees of top-tier security conferences such as IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, USENIX Security and NDSS. He is an ACM Distinguished Member, an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS), and the Steering Committee co-chair for SecureComm. He is currently directing the SUCCESS Lab at TAMU.