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

[Shellie Nazarenus]

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.

 

 

Shellie Nazarenus

Communications Mgr.

Cal-(IT)2 UC Irvine division 

416 Engineering Tower

Irvine, CA 92697-2800

office: (949) 824-9622 cell: (949) 533-2564 fax: (949) 824-8197

www.calit2.net

 

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