Fergie's Tech Blog

DARPA's New Tools for Net Defenders, Cyber-Snoops

Noah Shachtman writes on Danger Room:

It’s getting harder and harder for the Pentagon’s cyber defenders to protect military networks – and for federal snoops to peek in on our e-mail. DARPA, the Pentagon’s way-out research arm, has an idea for how to keep up: use the laws of heat flow to monitor network traffic. It's part of a bigger push to make sure net protectors and digital surveillance type can keep up with the rising tide of e-mail, web-surfing, and other online activities.

We all know about Moore’s Law – that computer processors will double in strength and speed every 18 months. But network traffic is grows even faster, at nearly double the rate. Every decade, the amount of packets expands a thousand-fold.

That’s a major worry for the Pentagon, and its cybersecurity pros. All that increased traffic means more bits to scan for viruses and other malicious code. If today’s trends keep up, DARPA program manager Brian Hearing tells DANGER ROOM, “we’d use the majority of DOD [Department of Defense] computers to monitor network traffic. Which won’t happen, obviously. So our ability to detect will drop.”

So Hearing is launching a new program, Scalable Network Monitoring, that aims to detect 99% of the bad code in a torrent of traffic, a hundred gigabits per second (GPS) -- with only a single false alarm per day. He's leading a meeting in Virginia next week, to kickstart the effort.

posted by Fergie @ 8/09/2007 11:17:00 AM