Earlier this month, Marina and I went to our first Principal Investigators meeting for a new DHS program on distributed denial of service defense (DDoS Defense), lead by DHS S&T Cybersecurity Division Program Manager Dan Massey. Dan is one of Doug Maughan’s team, and he seems to have picked up Doug’s impressive talent for running effective meetings. I presented these slides on our new spoofer project, a collaboration with Dr. Matthew Luckie, now a senior lecturer at U. Waikato, and Rob Beverly at NPS.

I had the honor of contributing to a panel on “Cyberwarfare and cyberattacks: protecting ourselves within existing limitations” at this year’s 9th Circuit Judicial Conference. The panel moderator was Hon. Thomas M. Hardiman, and the other panelists were Professor Peter Cowhey, of UCSD’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, and Professor and Lt. Col. Shane R. Reeves of West Point Academy. Lt. Col. Reeves gave a brief primer on the framework of the Law of Armed Conflict, distinguished an act of cyberwar from a cyberattack, and described the implications for political and legal constraints on governmental and private sector responses. Professor Cowhey followed with a perspective on how economic forces also constrain cybersecurity preparedness and response, drawing comparisons with other industries for which the cost of security technology is perceived to exceed its benefit by those who must invest in its deployment. I used a visualization of an Internet-wide cybersecurity event to illustrate technical, economic, and legal dimensions of the ecosystem that render the fundamental vulnerabilities of today’s Internet infrastructure so persistent and pernicious. A few people said I talked too fast for them to understand all the points I was trying to make, so I thought I should post the notes I used during my panel remarks. (My remarks borrowed heavily from Dan Geer’s two essays: Cybersecurity and National Policy (2010), and his more recent Cybersecurity as Realpolitik (video), both of which I highly recommend.) After explaining the basic concept of a botnet, I showed a video derived from CAIDA’s analysis of a botnet scanning the entire IPv4 address space (discovered and comprehensively analyzed by Alberto Dainotti and Alistair King). I gave a (too) quick rundown of the technological, economic, and legal circumstances of the Internet ecosystem that facilitate the deployment of botnets and other threats to networked critical infrastructure.
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The final report for our Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE2014) is available for viewing. The abstract:

On December 10-11 2014, we hosted the 4th interdisciplinary Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE) at the UC San Diego’s Supercomputer Center. This workshop series provides a forum for researchers, Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, economists, theorists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to inform current and emerging regulatory and policy debates. The objective for this year’s workshop was a structured consideration of whether and how policy-makers should try to shape the future of the Internet. To structure the discussion about policy, we began the workshop with a list of potential aspirations for our future telecommunications infrastructure (a list we had previously collated), and asked participants to articulate an aspiration or fear they had about the future of the Internet, which we summarized and discussed on the second day. The focus on aspirations was motivated by the high-level observation that before discussing regulation, we must agree on the objective of the regulation, and why the intended outcome is justified. In parallel, we used a similar format as in previous years: a series of focused sessions, where 3-4 presenters each prepared 10-minute talks on issues in recent regulatory discourse, followed by in-depth discussions. This report highlights the discussions and presents relevant open research questions identified by participants.

See the full workshop report at http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2015/wie2014_report/

Slides from workshop presentations are available at http://www.caida.org/workshops/wie/1412/

Draft white paper that motivated the workshop at:
http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2015/inventory_aspirations_internets_future/

The report for the 1st NDN Community Meeting (NDNcomm) is available online now. This report, “The First Named Data Networking Community Meeting (NDNcomm)“, is a brief summary of the first NDN Community Meeting held at UCLA in Los Angeles, California on September 4-5, 2014. The meeting provided a platform for the attendees from 39 institutions across seven countries to exchange their recent NDN research and development results, to debate existing and proposed functionality in security support, and to provide feedback into the NDN architecture design evolution.

The workshop was supported by the National Science Foundation CNS-1457074, CNS-1345286, and CNS-1345318. We thank the NDNcomm Program Committee members for their effort of putting together an excellent program. We thank all participants for their insights and feedback at the workshop.

On Wednesday 1 October 2014, CAIDA hosted a small invitation only workshop that brought together researchers working on large-scale Internet outage detection and characterization with researchers from the political sciences with specific expertise in Internet censorship, political violence (including Internet connectivity disruption ordered by authoritarian regimes for censorship), and Internet penetration. Participants viewed and demonstration of and discussed CAIDA’s current data analysis platform for the exploration of historical and realtime Internet measurement data (named “Charthouse”), and possible extensions of the platform to support political science research related to  macroscopic Internet outages.

 A primary use of our current platform is to detect/characterize large-scale Internet outages, i.e., entire regions or countries getting disconnected from the Internet for hours or days. We intend to extend the platform to enable more agile analysis, support larger datasets, improve geographic-based exploration and visualization, based on use case scenarios defined together with political scientists.

The workshop also included experts from the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Data Enabled Scientific Computing Group, who provided valuable insights into methods for scalable analysis of large data sets requiring high performance computing platforms.  We currently plan to implement part of the Charthouse platform using the Spark/Shark data analytics stack.

I had the honor of being invited to the most recent BITAG (Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group) meeting, to present some recent research (a collaboration with MIT’s CSAIL group) on identifying and analyzing instances of Internet interdomain congestion (an earlier version of which Matthew presented at a NANOG lightning talk in February).

Per their web site, BITAG’s mission is to “bring together engineers and other similar technical experts to develop consensus on broadband network management practices or other related technical issues that can affect users’ Internet experience“. (Their web site also hosts summaries of Silicon Flatirons workshop discussions that inspired the establishment of BITAG.)

It was gratifying to present to such an interested audience, who provided plenty of constructive feedback as well an invitation to join the technical working group (TWG). I look forward to future interactions with BITAG; they seem a potentially potent means of bringing much-needed transparency to increasingly compelling aspects of the Internet ecosystem.

On 28-29 May 2014, DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) held a meeting of the Principal Investigators of the PREDICT (Protected Repository for the Defense of Infrastructure Against Cyber Threats) Project, an initiative to facilitate the accessibility of computer and network operational data for use in cybersecurity defensive R&D. The project is a three-way partnership among government, critical information infrastructure providers, and security development communities (both academic and commercial), all of whom seek technical solutions to protect the public and private information infrastructure. The primary goal of PREDICT is to bridge the gap between producers of security-relevant network operations data and technology developers and evaluators who can leverage this data to accelerate the design, production, and evaluation of next-generation cybersecurity solutions.

In addition to presenting project updates, each PI presented on a special topic suggested by Program Manager Doug Maughan. I presented some reflective thoughts on 10 Years Later: What Would I Have done Differently? (Or what would I do today?). In this presentation, I revisited my 2008 top ten list of things lawyers should know about the Internet to frame some proposed forward-looking strategies for the PREDICT project in 2014.

Also noted at the meeting, DHS recently released a new broad agency announcement (BAA) that will contractually require investigators contribute into PREDICT any data created or used in testing and evaluation of the funded work (if the investigator has redistribution rights, and subject to appropriate disclosure control).

On 19-20 May 2014, the NSF Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Core Programs hosted a kickoff meeting in Washington D.C. for the next phase of the Future Internet Architectures Program. The program funds three projects for an additional two years each to create and demonstrate prototype implementations of their architecture protocol suites and test and evaluate them in one or more relevant application environments. The meeting allowed the projects to present overviews of their architectures and the environments in which they plan to test them, as well as their thoughts on how their architecture may shift the balance of power among players in the Internet ecosystem, and other ideas on how to evaluate their architecture’s benefits and incentives to deploy. CAIDA participates in the Named-Data Networking Project (NDN), one of the three projects that receive funding from the FIA NP Program. The NDN team’s presentations at this meeting are posted at http://named-data.net/publications/presentations/.