The design and evaluation of a defense system for Internet worms

Abstract

Many areas of society have become heavily dependent on services such as transportation facilities, utilities and so on that are implemented in part by large numbers of computers and communications links. Both past incidents and research studies show that a well-engineered Internet worm can disable such systems in a fairly simple way and, most notably, in a matter of a few minutes. This indicates the need for defenses against worms but their speed rules out the possibility of manually countering worm outbreaks. We present a platform that emulates the epidemic behavior of Internet active worms in very large networks. A reactive control system operates on top of the platform and provides a monitor/analyze/respond approach to deal with infections automatically. Details of our highly configurable platform and various experimental performance results are presented.