Addressing the Threat of Internet Worms

Abstract

Recent years have seen repeated releases of Internet-scale "worms" - programs that self-propagate across the network by exploiting security vulnerabilities in open Internet servers. The speed and size of the infections pose great challenges for defending against them. We will look at measured behavior of significant worms, likely evolution of "better" worms as attackers incorporate additional techniques, the state of the art in terms of defense mechanisms, and the challenging research problems that lie ahead.

Bio

Vern Paxson is a senior scientist at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, California, as well as a staff scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His main active research projects are network intrusion detection in the context of Bro, a high-performance network intrusion detection system he developed; large-scale network measurement and analysis; and Internet-scale attacks, particularly rapidly-propagating network "worms". This latter is pursued in the context of CCIED, the NSF-sponsored Collaborative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses, which he codirects with Prof. Stefan Savage of UCSD. Some of his other professional activities include: vice-chair of ACM SIGCOMM, program co-chair for the 2005 and 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, and co-founder of the Internet Measurement Conference.

• Presentation Slides [PPT]