Date: March 14, 2008
Time: 1:30pm
Location: NIA, Room 137
Additional Information: Webstream

DoS Models and Counter-Measures
Carl A. Gunter, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Although there has been considerable progress in developing models and analysis techniques for the protection of confidentiality and integrity in network protocols, there has been less progress on models and analysis techniques for availability. A variety of approaches have been attempted to address Denial of Service (DoS) threats on the Internet, but the problem is far from solved, and existing techniques are not easy to model uniformly or compare rigorously. The talk will provide an overview of important representative techniques and their tradeoffs. We will focus on a technique called selective verification that exploits the bandwidth limitations of adversaries as a DoS counter-measure and analyze its effectiveness using a shared channel model. In particular, we present an optimal algorithm that enables adaptive deployment of selective verification to limit the costs of protections so they are proportionate to the intensity of the attack. We also overview give a brief introduction to security challenges that arise when physical systems are being monitored and controlled using digital networks. Examples of this trend include smart buildings, which control building like door locks, lighting, and HVAC, and electric power grids, which control relays in transformer substations. Smart buildings and the power grid will be used to illustrate these issues.

Dr. Gunter received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1979 and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1985. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Cambridge in England before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2004 where he is a professor, Director of the Illinois Security Lab, and member of the Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security executive committee and the Information Trust Institute Steering Committee. He is the head of the Systems and Networking Area of the department of Computer Science at UIUC and the chair of the steering committee for the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). He does research and teaches in his areas of technical expertise: security, networks, programming languages, and software engineering. His work includes contributions to the semantics and design of programming and policy languages, models and analysis techniques for networks and security, and applications of formal logic in computer science. He is the author of more than 80 scientific research publications and patents and a textbook on semantics of programming languages published by MIT Press. He is a founder of Probaris, a company that provides identity management technologies, and has served as a consultant to research labs and companies and as an expert witness on legal cases concerning fraud, contract, copyright, and patent infringement.