Turbocharging Networks in the Public Sector

Networks have come to occupy a key position in the strategic armoury of the government, business and community sectors and now have impact on a broad array of policy and management arenas. An emphasis on relationships, trust and mutuality mean that networks function on a different operating logic to the conventional processes of government and business. It is therefore important that organizational members of networks are able to adopt the skills and culture necessary to operate successfully under these distinctive kinds of arrangements. Because networks function from a different operational logic to traditional bureaucracies, public sector organizations may experience difficulties in adapting to networked arrangements. Networks are formed to address a variety of social problems or meet capability gaps within organizations. As such they are often under pressure to quickly produce measurable outcomes and need to form rapidly and come to full operation quickly. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of how diverse types of networks are required for different management and policy situations and draws on a set of public sector case studies to understand/demonstrate how these various types of networked arrangements may be ‘turbo-charged’ so that they more quickly adopt the characteristics necessary to deliver required outcomes.

Modelling Denial of Service Attacks on JFK with Meadow's Cost-Based Framework

We present the first detailed application of Meadows’s cost-based modelling framework to the analysis of JFK, an Internet key agreement protocol. The analysis identifies two denial of service attacks against the protocol that are possible when an attacker is willing to reveal the source IP address. The first attack was identified through direct application of a cost-based modelling framework, while the second was only identified after considering coordinated attackers. Finally, we demonstrate how the inclusion of client puzzles in the protocol can improve denial of service resistance against both identified attacks.

Experiences in Passively Detecting Session Hijacking Attacks in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Current IEEE 802.11 wireless networks are vulnerable to session hijacking attacks as the existing standards fail to address the lack of authentication of management frames and network card addresses, and rely on loosely coupled state machines. Even the new WLAN security standard - IEEE 802.11i does not address these issues. In our previous work, we proposed two new techniques for improving detection of session hijacking attacks that are passive, computationally inexpensive, reliable, and have minimal impact on network performance. These techniques utilise unspoofable characteristics from the MAC protocol and the physical layer to enhance confidence in the intrusion detection process. This paper extends our earlier work and explores usability, robustness and accuracy of these intrusion detection techniques by applying them to eight distinct test scenarios. A correlation engine has also been introduced to maintain the false positives and false negatives at a manageable level. We also explore the process of selecting optimum thresholds for both detection techniques. For the purposes of our experiments, Snort-Wireless open source wireless intrusion detection system was extended to implement these new techniques and the correlation engine. Absence of any false negatives and low number of false positives in all eight test scenarios successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of the correlation engine and the accuracy of the detection techniques.