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Berkeley researchers to help build
Internet security testbed
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In
January 2003, the Sapphire worm (aka Slammer) broke speed
records as an unsuspecting Internet-using world went from
worm-free to global impact (burnout zones) in only 30 minutes.
MAP COURTESY OF CAIDA |
A team of researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of
Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) has
received a three-year $5.46 million grant to build a mini-Internet,
then hack into it, in an effort to develop better security methods
against crippling computer viruses and potential terrorist attacks.
The ambitious project, known as the Cyber Defense Technology Experimental
Research Network, or DETER, is funded by the National Science
Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Homeland Security. Project
architects will use sophisticated methods to build the most realistic
model of the entire Internet to date, including routers and hubs
to up to 1,000 personal computers. The system will be isolated
so that researchers from government, academia, and the private
sector can subject it to multiple disabling attacks without consequence
to real-life Internet traffic.
“One of the challenges of developing defense programs that
are effective against attacks from viruses and worms is that they
can only be tested in moderate-sized private research facilities
or through computer simulations that are not representative of
the way the Internet works in reality,” says Professor and
Chair Shankar Sastry of EECS, who will serve as DETER’s
principal investigator. Sastry was also interim chief scientist
of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest
of Society (CITRIS) in fall 2003.
As dependence on the Internet grows, experts believe that more
sophisticated attack techniques are being developed that will
be impossible to defend against with current technologies. Most
difficult are distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which
generate a flood of network packets from many different sources
to snarl legitimate activity.
DDoS attacks increased tenfold from 2001 to 2003, affecting targets
ranging from high-profile e-commerce sites to small Internet service
providers. In January 2003, the Sapphire worm hit more than 75,000
hosts worldwide within 10 minutes, leading to ATM failures and
network outages and disrupting airline flight schedules. In August,
hundreds of thousands of unprotected computers were infected with
the MSBlaster and SoBig worms, crashing PCs, Web servers, and
transaction processing systems.
“We are no longer talking about nuisance pranks and vandalism,
but potential losses in the billions of dollars,” says Terry
Benzel, assistant director for special projects at USC-ISI and
DETER co-investigator. SoBig alone caused an estimated $14.62
billion in business losses.
Sastry appeared last year before the Congressional Committee on
Homeland Security to testify about the need for the DETER testbed.
Other participants at Berkeley include Anthony Joseph as co-principal
investigator, CITRIS director Ruzena Bajcsy, and CITRIS researchers
Doug Tygar and David Culler.
While DETER will focus on building the testbed’s infrastructure,
a companion project involving Berkeley’s International Computer
Science Institute (ICSI), Purdue University, Pennsylvania State
University, and CITRIS researchers from UC Davis will develop
testing and evaluation methodologies.
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