Rémi Badonnel (Resist) will defend his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) on Wednesday, 9th March at 2pm in room A008.

His presentation is entitled “Managing Security for the Cyber-Space: From Smart Monitoring to Automated Configuration”.

Abstract: The Internet has become a great integration platform for building and operating complex and value-added networked systems. These systems are however exposed to a large variety of security attacks, that are also gaining in sophistication and coordination. In that context, the objective of my research work is to support security management for the cyberspace, with the elaboration of new monitoring and configuration solutions for these systems. A first axis of this work focuses on the investigation of smart monitoring methods capable to cope with low-resource networks. In particular, we propose a lightweight monitoring architecture for detecting security attacks in low-power and lossy networks. A second axis concerns the assessment and remediation of vulnerabilities that may occur when changes are operated on system configurations. Based on vulnerability descriptions, we design and implement dedicated strategies for improving the coverage and efficiency of vulnerability assessment activities using versioning and probabilistic techniques, and for preventing the occurrence of new vulnerabilities during remediation operations. A third axis is dedicated to the automated configuration of virtualized resources to support security management. In particular, we introduce a software-defined security approach for cloud infrastructures, and analyze to what extent programmability facilities can contribute to their protection at the earliest stage, through the dynamic generation of specialized system images with reduced attack surfaces. Complementarily, we work on building and verification techniques for supporting the orchestration of security chains, that are composed of virtualized network functions, such as firewalls or intrusion detection systems. Finally, several research perspectives on security automation are pointed out with respect to ensemble methods, composite services and verified artificial intelligence.