[UCI-CalIT2] Upcoming Seminar: "Defending Against Large-scale Attacks on the Internet"

[Anna L. SPITZER]

Title:                The Coral Project: Defending Against Large-scale Attacks on the Internet

 

Speaker:          Chenxi Wang, Carnegie Mellon University

 

Date:               Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2004

 

Time:               10:30 a.m.

 

Location:         3161 Engineering Gateway, UC Irvine

 

Host:                Paul Dourish

Abstract:          Computer worms and viruses are a prevalent threat to today's systems and networks, and recent outbreaks have become increasingly more virulent and damaging.

 

The Coral Project at Carnegie Mellon is working to develop innovative, network-wide defenses against widespread worm and virus attacks. The project's approach is rooted in one simple principle - understanding the fundamental factors that enable the rapid spread of malicious code, including topological and intrinsic causes. Researchers seek to exploit the characteristics of these factors to develop original network security technologies.

 

Wang will report on the Coral Project's first-year successes. She will provide equations that model malicious propagation in an arbitrary network topology and propose a general epidemic threshold condition that applies to arbitrary graphs, proving that under reasonable approximations, the epidemic threshold for a network is indicated by the inverse of the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix. Wang will also discuss the project's analysis of host- and edge-router-based containment results that show a slowdown in the worm spread rate that is linear to the number of hosts implementing the containment filter. 

 

The team is currently studying traces obtained from Symantec, Akamai and its own network. Preliminary study reveals interesting traffic patterns that potentially could evade containment mechanisms that operate strictly on limiting outgoing IP addresses. Wang will discuss the team's ongoing work in developing new containment techniques to curb the spread of e-mail and topological worms.

 

Bio:                  Dr. Chenxi Wang is a member of the research faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her doctorate degree from the University of Virginia in 2001. Her research interests lie in security issues in distributed systems, privacy and large-scale information dissemination. Wang is the principal investigator of an NSF medium ITR award to investigate network defenses against Internet worms. She is the recipient of a faculty fellowship from the Army Research Office and is the author of numerous technical publications. She has also served on committees for ESORICS, WORM and ACSAC.

  

Light Refreshments Served.  Free and open to the public.

 

 

Anna Lynn Spitzer

Senior Communications Specialist 

Cal-(IT)²

University of California, Irvine

416 Engineering Tower

Irvine, CA 92697-2800

Office: (949) 824-3317

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/public/uci-calit2/attachments/20041004/93e5438c/attachment.html