Sanjai Narain is a Senior Research Scientist in the Information Assurance and Security Department at Telcordia Technologies in Piscataway, NJ. His current research is on automated planning of secure and reliable infrastructure. This is based on his experience designing, building, testing and analyzing such infrastructure for large enterprises. To support his research, he has obtained funding from major government agencies such as DARPA, DISA, DHS and IARPA. He has organized and led several university-industry teams with partners such as MIT, Princeton, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Boeing and Sparta. He is the lead editor of a new IEEE JSAC issue on network infrastructure configuration. He has served on program committees for ACM, IEEE and USENIX conferences or workshops. He is coauthoring a chapter on network configuration validation in Building and Running Robust Networks and Applications: A Handbook. He joined Telcordia in 1990 when it was called Bellcore. His earlier research at Telcordia was on network management tools for SONET, ATM and DSL networks. From 1981 to 1990 he worked at RAND Corporation where he developed technologies to reason about discrete-event simulation models. He has one issued patent on low-cost DSL loop qualification and three filed patents on configuration validation and synthesis. He has over twenty publications in journals, conferences and workshops. His formal training is in mathematical logic, programming languages, and electrical engineering. He studied logic with Professor Alonzo Church at UCLA. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 1988 where his thesis was nominated for the ACM Distinguished Dissertation Award. He obtained an M.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University in 1981. He obtained a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, in 1979 and graduated First Class with Honors.

Dr. Narain will discuss IP ASSURE: NON-INVASIVE VULNERABILITY AND COMPLIANCE TESTING OF IP NETWORKS. Given the complexity of modern IP networks, a critical need is testing whether these comply with intended end-to-end security, connectivity, performance and reliability requirements. These requirements are not only enterprise-specific but also those based on government regulations such as FISMA. The typical method of performing such testing is invasive. However, this suffers from significant limitations. It is non-scalable, potentially introduces malware into the network, burdens the network and network administrators, and is unable to diagnose deeper structural vulnerabilities like single points of failure. This talk presents a new, non-invasive Telcordia product called IPAssure that overcomes these limitations. IPAssure is based on the observation that configurations of network components represent its “DNA” in that deep properties of the network can be evaluated from their analysis. Network administrators simply upload their configurations into a web-based IPAssure server. The server evaluates compliance of networks to a knowledge-based of several hundred best-practices and network-specific requirements, reports non-compliance, makes suggestions for configuration repair and displays visualizations of critical logical network topologies. IPAssure has been deployed at the Securities and Exchange Commission to test a network of about 300 components. The talk also outlines new techniques for repairing incorrect configurations and synthesizing new ones using modern constraint solving techniques.