Supervisor

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Abstract

Co-Supervisored by System Security Lab Long-range satellite communications networks suffer from high network latencies due to the long distances to satellites. These high latencies have a detrimental effect on the performance of common protocols used for internet traffic, such as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Currently widely-used tools to optimise TCP performance are incompatible with the encrypted traffic of current VPNs. This has led to many operators resorting to providing their communication services unencrypted, leaving customers exposed to eavesdropping attacks.

In our research group, we have developed QPEP [1], a novel combination of a VPN and a satellite performance-enhancing proxy, which enables the use of encrypted traffic over satellite links without the usual performance drawbacks.

This project would improve on this work in one or more of the following ways: Low Earth Orbit Evaluation Packet Loss Resilience Scalability & Multi-user Environments

[1] Pavur, J. C., et al. "QPEP: An actionable approach to secure and performant broadband from geostationary orbit." (2021). https://github.com/ssloxford/qpep https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-074-paper.pdf