Archive for the 'Security' Category

my 9/11/2008: DHS cybersecurity PI meeting

Thursday, September 25th, 2008 by kc

Last week I attended the biannual principal investigators (PI) meeting of DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s Cybersecurity program. I found myself assigned the speaking slot at 9:30am on September 11, on the 26th floor of an Arlington building with a more majestic view of the Pentagon than I’ve ever had. I spent the coffee breaks looking out the windows at commercial aircraft continually flying right by the Pentagon en route to DCA, an airport the feds bravely did not close down after 9/11/2001. (who says the terrorists won?)

(more…)

top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #6

Monday, April 21st, 2008 by kc

[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

#6: While the looming problems of the Internet indicate the need for a closer objective look, a growing number of segments of society have network measurement access to, and use, private network information on individuals for purposes we might not approve of if we knew how the data was being used.

(more…)

top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #4

Saturday, April 19th, 2008 by kc

[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

#4: The data dearth is not a new problem in the field; many public and private sector efforts have tried and failed to solve it.

(more…)

top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #3

Friday, April 18th, 2008 by kc

[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

#3: Despite the methodological limitations of Internet science today, the few data points available suggest a dire picture:

(more…)

top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #2

Thursday, April 17th, 2008 by kc

[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

#2: Our scientific knowledge about the Internet is weak, and the obstacles to progress are primarily issues of economics, ownership, and trust (EOT), rather than technical.

(more…)

“we should be able to do a much better job at modeling Internet attacks”

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 by kc

one of my favorite program managers is posed the following question by senior management at his defense-related funding agency: “we should be able to do a much better job modeling internet attacks. what research can we fund that would enable us to do a better job at modeling internet attacks?”

(more…)

what we can’t measure on the Internet

Sunday, August 26th, 2007 by kc

As the era of the NSFnet Backbone Service came to a close in April 1995, the research community, and the U.S. public, lost the only set of publicly available statistics for a large national U.S. backbone. The transition to the commercial sector essentially eliminated the public availability of statistics and analyses that would allow scientific understanding of the Internet a macroscopic level.

In 2004 I compiled an (incomplete) list of what we generally can’t measure on the Internet, from a talk I gave on our NSF-funded project correlating heterogeneous measurement data to achieve system-level analysis of Internet traffic trends:

(more…)