EventGuard: A System Architecture for Securing Publish-Subscribe Networks

Publish-subscribe (pub-sub) is an emerging paradigm for building a large number of distributed systems. A wide area pub-sub system is usually implemented on an overlay network infrastructure to enable information dissemination from publishers to subscribers. Using an open overlay network raises several security concerns such as: confidentiality and integrity, authentication, authorization and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. In this article we present EventGuard, a framework for building secure wide-area pub-sub systems. The EventGuard architecture is comprised of three key components: (1) a suite of security guards that can be seamlessly plugged-into a content-based pub-sub system, (2) a scalable key management algorithm to enforce access control on subscribers, and (3) a resilient pub-sub network design that is capable of scalable routing, handling message dropping-based DoS attacks, and node failures. The design of EventGuard mechanisms aims at providing security guarantees while maintaining the system’s overall simplicity, scalability, and performance metrics. We describe an implementation of the EventGuard pub-sub system to show that EventGuard is easily stackable on any content-based pub-sub core. We present detailed experimental results that quantify the overhead of the EventGuard pub-sub system and demonstrate its resilience against various attacks.