Securing publish-subscribe overlay services with EventGuard

Abstract

A publish-subscribe overlay service is a wide-area communication infrastructure that enables information dissemination across geographically scattered and potentially unlimited number of publishers and subscribers. A wide-area publish-subscribe (pub-sub) system is often implemented as a collection of spatially disparate nodes communicating on top of a peer to peer overlay network. Such a model presents many inherent benefits such as scalability and performance, as well as potential challenges such as: (i) confidentiality & integrity, (ii) authentication, and (iii) denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. In this paper we present EventGuard for securing pub-sub overlay services. EventGuard comprises of a suite of security guards that can be seamlessly plugged-into a content-based pub-sub system. EventGuard mechanisms aim at providing security guarantees while maintaining the system's overall simplicity, scalability and performance metrics. We present an implementation which shows that EventGuard is easily stackable on any content-based pub-sub core. Finally, our experimental results show that EventGuard can secure a pub-sub system with minimal performance penalty.