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UC Berkeley professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Shankar Sastry is the principal investigator on the DETER project.

Seeking an edge in the battle against computer worms and viruses, UC Berkeley researchers are building a virtual playing field for cyber war games. By simulating the Internet on a small scale, the virtual laboratory of 1,000 networked computers will help researchers develop new ways to beat hackers who threaten our online infrastructure.

Supported by a three-year, $5.46 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the Cyber Defense Technology Experimental Research (DETER) network is a collaboration between UC Berkeley researchers in the Center for Information Technology Researchers in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI).

"One of the challenges of creating effective defense programs for attacks from viruses and worms is that they are only tested in moderate-sized private research facilities or through computer simulations that are not representative of the way the Internet works in reality," says UC Berkeley professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences Shankar Sastry, the principal investigator on the DETER project.

In recent years, cyber-attacks have become more common, and increasingly severe. For example, in January 2003 the Slammer/Sapphire worm infected more than 75,000 hosts globally within 10 minutes, leading to ATM failures and major network outages. Then, in August, the MSBlaster and SoBig worms brought portions of the commercial Internet to its knees. Indeed, SoBig was considered the most economically damaging virus ever, causing an estimated $14.62 billion in business losses.

"With so much of the nation now dependent on the Internet, we are no longer talking about nuisance pranks and vandalism, but potential losses in the billions of dollars," says Terry Benzel, assistant director for special projects at USC-ISI and co-investigator of the project.

Cyberwarriors will be fighting a fast-spreading foe. These maps show the January 2003 spread of the Sapphire worm (also known as Slammer), growing from nothing (top) to global impact (blue zones at bottom) in only half an hour. (Courtesy CAIDA)

The DETER network will be a scale model that simulates the multitude of components on the real Internet--from routers and hubs to desktop PCs. The network will consist of three permanent hardware clusters, or nodes, located at UC Berkeley, USC-ISI, and ISI-East in Virginia. Each computer in a node will represent several network connections. Through this shared online laboratory, researchers from government, academia, and the private sector will have the opportunity to unleash their own malicious computer code and test new defense methods in a contained environment.

What impact do you think the DETER network will have on computer protection? We want to hear from you...

"There is a lot of very good research from the past 10 years that hasn't made its way to commercial products," Benzel says. "I believe strongly that one of the reasons we haven't seen security technology used as much is because there has been a lack of sufficient evidence of the benefits and tradeoffs these new technologies bring."

In July, Sastry, CITRIS's interim Chief Scientist, testified before the Congressional Committee on Homeland Security regarding the need for DETER. The US Department of Homeland Security is helping fund the testbed through a collaboration with the NSF.

"Through this project we will develop traffic models and architectures that are scaled down from the actual Internet, but still representative enough that people can have confidence in it," Sastry says.

Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)

"NSF awards $5.46 million to UC Berkeley and USC to build testbed for cyber war games" by Sarah Yang (UC Berkeley Media Relations)

Lab Notes is published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking research underway today at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow.

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© 2003 UC Regents. Updated 11/30/03.