Collaborative internet worm containment

Large-scale worm outbrakes that leads to distributed denial-of-dervice attacks pose a major threat to internet infrastructure security. To prevent computers from such attacks deployment of fast, scalable security overlay networks based on distributed hash tables to facilitate high-speed intrusion detection and alert-information exchange are proposed. An effective system for worm detection and cyberspace defence must have robustness, cooperation among multiple sites, responsiveness to unexpected worms and efficiency and scalability. Deployment of collaborative WormShield monitors on just 1 percent of the vulnerable edge networks can detect worm signatures roughly 10 times faster than with independent monitors.published_or_final_versio

Beyond just bacteria: Functional biomes in the gut ecosystem including virome, mycobiome, archaeome and helminths

Gut microbiota refers to a complex network of microbes, which exerts a marked influenceon the host’s health. It is composed of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and helminths. Bacteria, or collectively,the bacteriome, comprises a significant proportion of the well-characterized microbiome. However,the other communities referred to as ‘dark matter’ of microbiomes such as viruses (virome), fungi(mycobiome), archaea (archaeome), and helminths have not been completely elucidated. Developmentof new and improved metagenomics methods has allowed the identification of complete genomesfrom the genetic material in the human gut, opening new perspectives on the understanding ofthe gut microbiome composition, their importance, and potential clinical applications. Here, wereview the recent evidence on the viruses, fungi, archaea, and helminths found in the mammalian gut,detailing their interactions with the resident bacterial microbiota and the host, to explore the potentialimpact of the microbiome on host’s health. The role of fecal virome transplantations, pre-, pro-, andsyn-biotic interventions in modulating the microbiome and their related concerns are also discussed

Resilience Strategies for Network Challenge Detection, Identification and Remediation

The enormous growth of the Internet and its use in everyday life make it an attractive target for malicious users. As the network becomes more complex and sophisticated it becomes more vulnerable to attack. There is a pressing need for the future internet to be resilient, manageable and secure. Our research is on distributed challenge detection and is part of the EU Resumenet Project (Resilience and Survivability for Future Networking: Framework, Mechanisms and Experimental Evaluation). It aims to make networks more resilient to a wide range of challenges including malicious attacks, misconfiguration, faults, and operational overloads. Resilience means the ability of the network to provide an acceptable level of service in the face of significant challenges; it is a superset of commonly used definitions for survivability, dependability, and fault tolerance. Our proposed resilience strategy could detect a challenge situation by identifying an occurrence and impact in real time, then initiating appropriate remedial action. Action is autonomously taken to continue operations as much as possible and to mitigate the damage, and allowing an acceptable level of service to be maintained. The contribution of our work is the ability to mitigate a challenge as early as possible and rapidly detect its root cause. Also our proposed multi-stage policy based challenge detection system identifies both the existing and unforeseen challenges. This has been studied and demonstrated with an unknown worm attack. Our multi stage approach reduces the computation complexity compared to the traditional single stage, where one particular managed object is responsible for all the functions. The approach we propose in this thesis has the flexibility, scalability, adaptability, reproducibility and extensibility needed to assist in the identification and remediation of many future network challenges

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Software and systems complexity can have a profound impact on information security. Such complexity is not only imposed by the imperative technical challenges of monitored heterogeneous and dynamic (IP and VLAN assignments) network infrastructures, but also through the advances in exploits and malware distribution mechanisms driven by the underground economics. In addition, operational business constraints (disruptions and consequences, manpower, and end-user satisfaction), increase the complexity of the problem domain... Copyright SANS Institut