Fahmy Contributes to DETER-EMIST

Purdue University has partnered with UC Berkeley, ISI, Penn State University, UC Davis, ICSI, McAfee, Sparta, and SRI in two important projects: DETER and EMIST. The Cyber Defense Technology Experimental Research Network (DETER) project is an experimental testbed that allows researchers to test and evaluate Internet cyber security technologies in a realistic, but safe environment. This environment can be accessed remotely, but is completely quarantined from the Internet. The Evaluation Methods for Internet Security Technology (EMIST) project is a companion project that designs the testing methodologies and benchmarks for the DETER testbed. DETER and EMIST will accelerate security research by creating realistic experimental scenarios that give more accurate results, and testing unforeseen interactions among security technologies. The two projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

DETER and EMIST currently allow rigorous testing of computer security technologies that protect against worms, viruses, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and attacks against the Internet infrastructure and protocols. Examples of Internet infrastructure in this context include protocols that allow the lookup and routing of data across the Internet, such as the Internet Domain Name System and the Border Gateway Protocol.

The EMIST research group includes experts in security, networking, data analysis, software engineering, and operating systems. Purdue Computer Science Professor Sonia Fahmy's focus in EMIST is on modeling and experimentation with DDoS and routing attacks. Professor Eugene Spafford and Professor Ness Shroff from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are also investigators in EMIST. The team from Purdue is developing innovative models to characterize the impact of attacks on Internet infrastructure and hosts, both spatially and temporally. The team is also developing a suite of tools and benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of defense technologies. This suite will become available to the Internet security research community for easily testing the defenses they are designing, and visualizing their key results. This will allow a much more comprehensive and realistic evaluation of the efficacy of such defenses than what current available tools allow. More information on this work can be found at http://www.isi.edu/deter/projects.html and on Professor Fahmy's web page.

For more information on the projects, please visit DETER at http://www.isi.edu/deter/ and EMIST at http://emist.ist.psu.edu/. See also the Government Security News magazine article at http://www.gsnmagazine.com/nov_04/deter_program.html.