Research Frontiers of Network Behavior Analysis

Abstract

As the Internet continues to bring innovative applications and services to the broad society, making sense of behavioral objects on the Internet with network behavior analysis will remain an important technique for understanding and characterizing novel network environments, emerging network applications, and new networked systems. This chapter presents the research frontiers of network behavior analysis in cloud computing, smart home networks, and the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigms. This chapter first discusses network behavior analysis as a service (NBA-as-a-service) in cloud computing environments for monitoring and securing large-scale Internet data centers. Subsequently, this chapter presents how network behavior analysis provides new traffic and behavior insights into Internet-connected devices in distributed smart home networks. Finally this chapter introduces a multidimensional network behavior analysis framework to characterize behavioral patterns of heterogeneous IoT devices in edge networks. Network Behavior Analysis in the CloudCloud computing integrates data, applications, users, and servers on a vast scale and enables a global optimization of computing resources. However, due to security threats from both outside and inside the cloud, security remains as a significant challenge and obstacle in the wide adoptions of cloud computing paradigms. To enhance the security of networks, applications, and data in the cloud, the study [1] envisions a profiling-as-a-service architecture to characterize, understand and profile network traffic at multiple layers in the multi-tenant cloud computing environment: network routers, hypervisors, virtual instances, and applications. The proposed architecture will not only provide an in-depth understanding on traffic patterns of cloud tenants, but also enhance the security of cloud computing by collaboratively detecting and filtering unwanted traffic towards cloud instances.