CI Research for HS: Fixed Infrastructure

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CI Research for HS Fixed Infrastructure

• Joseph Bannister
• USC Information Sciences Institute
• February 26, 2003

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Do You Know Where Your Infrastructure Is Tonight?
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Todays Shortfalls

• Visible infrastructures
• Public transportation, highways, airline routes
  and status, architectural, markets and finance,
  orbital and deep-space assets
• Invisible infrastructures
• Gas, water, power, waste removal, goods
  distribution, pipelines
• Cyberinfrastructure (CI)
• Internet
• Grids
• We know little about our own CI
• Topological, geographical, administrative
• Equipment hardware/software configurations
• Vulnerabilities

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Vital Life Signs

• Academe has effectively been discouraged from
  studying CI as an interesting phenomenon in its
  own right
• Emphasis is on developing CI
• In time of crisis, decision and policy makers
  will be hampered by ignorance of the state of CI
• In disaster CI will be affected by damage or
  overload
• If CI is the patient, then
• There are few doctors
• There are fewer nurses

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Whos Watching CI?

• Hobbyists
• Dedicated people with specific intellectual
  interests
• Dwindling population after telecom downturn
• Professionals
• Companies with product or service to sell
• Focus on understanding the behavior of customers
• Researchers
• Small number of labs who study the Internet from
  the point of view of intellectual curiosity
• Mapping, traffic, performance, modeling, scaling,
  growth

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CI, HS, and NSF a Proposed Agenda

• Reestablish academic position in the study of CI
  as an object of interest
• Study and understanding of CI is critical to its
  defense
• Fund broader, deeper data collection
• Emphasize continuity, consistency, archiving of
  results
• Maintain the delicate balance among disclosure,
  privacy, and security

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Specific Pathways to Securing CI

• Topological router maps
• Snapshots, history, archives
• Extend topological maps to hosts, NATs,
  firewalls, links
• Annotated maps
• Understand vulnerabilities
• Map software (ports, services, middleware)
• Census
• Names numbers in use
• Traffic characteristics