talk: Beyond Reactive Management of Network...

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:41:14 -0400
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Full Title: talk: Beyond Reactive Management of Network Intrusions, Noon 10/12 ITE456
Department of Information Systems Colloquium

Beyond Reactive Management of Network Intrusions

Professor Sushil Jajodia
Center for Secure Information Systems
George Mason University

12:00pm Wednesday, 12 October 2011, ITE456, UMBC

This talk will discuss issues and methods for survivability of systems under malicious attacks. To protect from such attacks, it is necessary to take steps to prevent attacks from succeeding. At the same time, it is important to recognize that not all attacks can be averted at the outset; attacks that are successful to some degree must be recognized as unavoidable and comprehensive support for identifying and responding to attacks is required.

In my talk, I will describe the recent research on attack graphs that represent known attack sequences attackers can use to penetrate computer networks. I will show how attack graphs can be used to compute actual sets of hardening measures that guarantee the safety of given critical resources. Attack graphs can also be used to correlate received alerts, hypothesize missing alerts, and predict future alerts, all at the same time. Thus, they offer a promising solution for administrators to monitor and predict the progress of an intrusion, and take appropriate countermeasures in a timely manner.

I will conclude my talk with a demo of the working system.

Sushil Jajodia is University Professor, BDM International Professor, and the director of Center for Secure Information Systems in the Volgenau School of Engineering at the George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. He served as the chair of the Department of Information and Software Engineering during 1998-2002. He joined Mason after serving as the director of the Database and Expert Systems Program within the Division of Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Before that he was the head of the Database and Distributed Systems Section in the Computer Science and Systems Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Milan, Italy; Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University, England; and King's College, London, England.