Yixin Sun, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has published research to help communication network managers strengthen security and privacy-preserving systems.Sun, who holds a joint appointment as the Anita Jones Career Enhancement assistant professor of computer science, collaborated with colleagues at Princeton, Purdue and ETH Zurich to identify risks of routing attacks. Their review paper published in Communications of the ACM, Securing Internet Applications from Routing Attacks, presents steps to secure the global routing system and critical Internet applications such as Tor, certificate authorities and the bitcoin network.
Whereas concerns about routing attacks typically center on availability and confidentiality, Sun and her co-authors show that routing attacks on Internet applications can cause more serious harms such as unmasking political dissidents, impersonating legitimate web sites and stealing cryptocurrency. Existing defenses focus on either applications or the network as separate entities.
Sun's innovation is a cross-layered approach that treats the applications layer and network layer as a holistic, interconnected system. Sun and her co-authors conclude their review with recommendations to help application developers and network operators adopt and implement cross-layer solutions.