Abstract:

In this talk, Dr. Anup K. Ghosh, Senior Scientist, DARPA, will describe the key challenges the Dept of Defense faces in mobile networking and information assurance. The goal of this talk is to elicit the research community's best ideas to address the key challenges DoD must overcome to enable secure networking in the future military paradigm of net centricity.

The first half of the talk will present the challenges of mobile networking in three key areas: efficiency, connectivity, and security. The problems of going from fixed networks to mobile, connected networks to episodic, and from fiber to ether presents considerable challenges to current networking protocols and approaches. For example, TCP/IP can be severely inefficient in certain wireless applications to the point of making it untenable. Likewise the diversity of physical media, waveforms, and protocols prevent significant leveraging of commercial networking technologies to the wireless environment. Finally, current security regimes designed for fixed networks such as IPSEC, PKI, and Multi-Level Security are significantly challenged by the requirements imposed by mobile networking applications.

The second half of the talk will describe some key challenges for securing the global information grid (GIG) as it applies to the DoD enterprise. Current network defense practice is designed with a fortress mentality to create as hardened a shell as possible; however, once the exterior is breached, the network falls completely. The vision moving forward is to design the GIG with dynamic network defenses that have the intelligence to recognize attacks and failures, to distinguish malicious from benign users, to provide traceback and attribution of attacks, and to adaptively reconfigure and evolve in the face of attacks and failures _ in otherwords an autonomic command and control system for networks. Some of the technical challenges to realize this vision include:

• Detecting and mitigating the insider threat
• Designing networks that reconfigure autonomically in response to attacks
• Designing software that is self-monitoring, self-certifying, and self-evolving
• Designing defenses such that they are not dependent on the platform they are defending
• Designing trust-based credentials where user privilege is granted based on trust that is continually reassessed and revoked when access is no longer desirable
• Defining security metrics that can be used to measure the improvement in security posture of a network given a technology or composite set of technologies
• Designing situational awareness utilities that provide continual assessment of network health and operational impact
• Designing tools for network traceback, geolocation, and attribution of attacks

Finally, Dr. Ghosh will describe how best to approach DARPA and other DoD funding agencies with ideas that can significantly enhance the nation's security.

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Designated as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education by the National Security Agency

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	The Committee on National Security Systems and the National Security Agency have certified that George Mason University offers a set of courseware that has been reviewed by National Level Information Assurance Subject Matter Experts and determined to meet National Training Standards for Information Systems Security Professionals, NSTISSI No. 4011, 4012, and 4013 for academic years 2005 - 2008.

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