Fred Palma | Computer Scientist

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The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science released a new report on cyber security and research called “Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace.” The report is available for free online at the National Academies Press.

The report lists three broad categories that lack of cyber security falls into:

First is the threat of catastrophe-a cyberattack, especially in conjunction with a physical attack, could result in thousands of deaths and many billions of dollars of damage in a very short time. Second is frictional drag on important economic and security-related processes. Today, insecurities in cyberspace systems and networks allow adversaries (in particular, criminals) to extract billions of dollars in fraud and extortion-and force businesses to expend additional resources to defend themselves against these threats. If cyberspace does not become more secure, the citizens, businesses, and governments of tomorrow will continue to face similar pressures, and most likely on a greater scale. Third, concerns about insecurity may inhibit the use of IT in the future and thus lead to a self-denial of the benefits that IT brings, benefits that will be needed for the national competitiveness of the United States as well as for national and homeland security.

It also lists a set of ten provisions that could form a Cyber Security Bill of Rights. The provisions are:

I. Availability of system and network resources to legitimate users.
II. Easy and convenient recovery from successful attacks.
III. Control over and knowledge of one’s own computing environment.
IV. Confidentiality of stored information and information exchange.
V. Authentication and provenance.
VI. The technological capability to exercise fine-grained control over the flow of information in and through systems.
VII. Security in using computing directly or indirectly in important applications, including financial, health care, and electoral transactions and real-time remote control of devices that interact with physical processes.
VIII. The ability to access any source of information (e.g., e-mail, Web page, file) safely.
IX. Awareness of what security is actually being delivered by a system or component.
X. Justice for security problems caused by another party.

Tags: security by Fred
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The shape of the online universe. This image shows the hierarchical structure of the Internet, based on the connections between individual nodes (such as service providers). Three distinct regions are apparent: an inner core of highly connected nodes, an outer periphery of isolated networks, and a mantle-like mass of peer-connected nodes. The bigger the node, the more connections it has. Those nodes that are closest to the center are connected to more well-connected nodes than are those on the periphery.

The core: At the center of the Internet are about 80 core nodes through which most traffic flows. Remove the core, and 70 percent of the other nodes are still able to function through peer-to-peer connections.

The periphery: At the very edge of the Internet are 5,000 or so isolated nodes that are the most dependent upon the core and become cut off if the core is removed or shut down. Yet those nodes within this periphery are able to stay connected because of their peer-to-peer connections.

Tags: Internet by Fred
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Routing traffic through peer-to-peer networks could stave off Internet congestion, according to a new study.

The increased use of peer-to-peer communications could improve the overall capacity of the Internet and make it run much more smoothly. That’s the conclusion of a novel study mapping the structure of the Internet.

It’s the first study to look at how the Internet is organized in terms of function, as well as how it’s connected, says Shai Carmi, a physicist who took part in the research at the Bar Ilan University, in Israel. “This gives the most complete picture of the Internet available today,” he says.

While efforts have been made previously to plot the topological structure in terms of the connections between Internet nodes–computer networks or Internet Service Providers that act as relay stations for carrying information about the Net–none have taken into account the role that these connections play. “Some nodes may not be as important as other nodes,” says Carmi.

The researchers’ results depict the Internet as consisting of a dense core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.

Take away the core, and an interesting thing happens: about 30 percent of the nodes from the outer shell become completely cut off. But the remaining 70 percent can continue communicating because the middle region has enough peer-connected nodes to bypass the core.

With the core connected, any node is able to communicate with any other node within about four links. “If the core is removed, it takes about seven or eight links,” says Carmi. It’s a slower trip, but the data still gets there. Carmi believes we should take advantage of these alternate pathways to try to stop the core of the Internet from clogging up. “It can improve the efficiency of the Internet because the core would be less congested,” he says.

To build their map of the Internet, published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers enlisted the assistance of 5,000 online volunteers who downloaded a program to help identify the connections between the 20,000 known nodes.

The distributed program sends information requests, or pings, to other parts of the Internet and records the route of the information on each journey.

Previous efforts had relied upon only a few dozen large computers to carry out this task, says Carmi. But by using this distributed approach, which meant collecting up to six million measurements a day over a period of two years from thousands of observation points around the world, it was possible to reveal more connections, says Scott Kirkpatrick, a professor of computer science and engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who also took part in the study. In fact, the project has already identified about 20 percent more of the interconnections between Internet nodes than ever before.

The researchers then used a novel hierarchical approach to map the connectivity data, taking into account how the nodes are connected. Each node was assessed based on how well connected it was to other nodes that are better connected.

Most previous research efforts only considered the number of connections as an indicator of the importance of a node without factoring in where those nodes lead, says Carmi. But taking this new approach, known as a k-shell model, allows for dead-end connections to be discounted, since they play a lesser role in the connectivity of the Internet.

Seth Bullock, a computer scientist at University of Southampton who studies network complexity and natural systems, finds it encouraging to see people taking a more sophisticated approach to modeling network structures, which are often quite crude.

But, Bullock warns, although there are potential benefits to improving the efficiency of the Internet using peer-to-peer networks, letting peer-to-peer networks grow in an unconstrained way could just as easily result in the creation of more congestion. For example, there would be nothing to prevent them from channeling data through the same nodes, thereby creating congestion elsewhere. Even so, there is currently a lot of interest in trying to figure out how to improve the Internet in the future; revealing its structure should help this process, says Kirkpatrick.

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

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The Institution of Engineering and Technology
http://www.theiet.org/aboutus/webdev/index.cfm

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