Liu awarded NSF grant on Multipath TCP Security

Alex Liu, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, has received a three-year research grant as the Principal Investigator from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program at NSF. The title of the project is "Multipath TCP Side Channel Vulnerabilities and Defenses". This project is in collaboration with M. Zubair Shafiq, who graduated from Michigan State University in 2014 under the supervision of Alex Liu and is currently an Assistant Professor at The University of Iowa, and Zhiyun Qian, who is currently an Assistant Professor at The University of California at Riverside.

The objective of this project is to understand and strengthen the security of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) - an IETF standardized suite of TCP extensions that allow one MPTCP connection, consisting of multiple sub-connections between two hosts, to use multiple paths simultaneously. Even though MPTCP has been widely deployed, its security is yet to be well understood. The project is expected to raise awareness of MPTCP security and ultimately yield a foundation for MPTCP security. The study will further increase the acceptance of MPTCP as an efficient, trustworthy, and next-generation transport layer protocol, especially considering that the deployment of new protocols can always be hindered by security concerns. The results will lead to development of guidelines and specifications for MPTCP through standards organizations such as IETF.

(Date Posted: 2015-08-31)