[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       isn
Subject:    [ISN] Information Security Under Scrutiny By Researchers
From:       mea culpa <jericho () dimensional ! com>
Date:       1999-03-18 10:18:38
[Download RAW message or body]


Source: Georgia Institute Of Technology 
<http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/rco.html>
Posted 3/17/99 

Information Security Under Scrutiny By Researchers 

While the security of the average consumer's online transactions grabs the
public's attention, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are
studying electronic commerce with more far-reaching consequences.

"The largest chunk of electronic commerce, an estimated $800 billion a
year by 2003, is conducted business to business," said Dr. Blaine Burnham,
director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC). "That's
where the consequences of information system failure are highest and where
GTISC can make the largest contributions."

Burnham believes business-to-business electronic commerce deserves the
attention of researchers because breaches in its information security
could greatly affect everything from airline and rail travel to power
generation to manufacturing. And the same technologies that affect
security of business-to-business online transactions also apply to the
consumer world.

"As businesses become more reliant on electronic commerce, they are
becoming very susceptible to failure in their information systems," he
warned. "These disruptions could have a fairly significant effect." 

For example, manufacturers adopting lean manufacturing practices are
moving away from warehousing large stocks of parts. They order parts
electronically for "just in time" delivery to assembly lines. Disruption
of the information system would halt assembly lines and cost factories
millions of dollars.

"Historically, information security meant to protect and confine
information," Burnham said. "Now, the emphasis is on making sure the
information is correct, or authentic, and timely."

GTISC researchers are addressing technical issues related to this shift in
emphasis, developing programs to detect external attacks and manage the
tradeoff between system performance and security. Policy studies address
sources of information security breaches and the importance of information
security to economic growth.

"We want to make information systems more reliable,"  Burnham said. "They
must be more robust and able to deal with malicious, as well as
accidental, disruptions."


Detecting Attacks with Neural Networks

While internal attacks on information security are actually more
widespread, the threat of external attacks by hackers is very real and
quite complex.

"The individual creativity of attackers, the wide range of computer
hardware and operating systems, and the ever- changing nature of the
overall threat to targeted systems have contributed to the difficulty in
identifying network system intrusions," said Jim Cannady, a research
scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

Cannady is using the power and flexibility of artificial neural networks
-- which are capable of learning from their experiences -- to detect both
known and new types of external attacks. Neural networks consist of
collections of processing elements that are highly interconnected, each
transforming a set of inputs to a set of desired outputs.

In a neural network demonstration project called SENTINEL, Cannady is
developing an intrusion detection system that identifies not only previous
types of attacks, but new ones -- something current rule-based systems
cannot do. The system gains experience with each effort so that it
"learns" the characteristics of attacks. That should allow the system to
eventually predict attacks and monitor activities, collecting information
for responses to attacks and the prosecution of those behind them.


Information Security Trade-offs

Tradeoffs must be made between information security needs and application
performance. Security computations consume processing resources, affecting
the performance of shared, collaborative, real-time and electronic
commerce programs.  As a result, host computers often cannot handle
Internet applications that require high levels of security.

Dr. Karsten Schwan, a professor in the College of Computing, and Ph.D.
student Phyllis Schneck have addressed the problem with adaptive security
protocols that adjust to changes in security requirements and computing
resources.

"Our mission is to address performance versus security tradeoffs by
adapting to the constantly changing availability of computation and
communication resources," Schneck said. She and Schwan conducted the
research with Dr. Santosh Chokhani, president and CEO of CygnaCom
Solutions, an information security company in McLean, Va.

"We want to provide an on-line management of these resources over time,"
Schwan explained. "The goal is to reduce overall risk by borrowing
available security processing resources on one communication stream to
"lend" to other application streams that may currently be lacking." 

Schwan and colleagues have developed a suite of dynamic authentication
heuristics (exploratory problem-solving techniques) to help achieve high
levels of security with scarce computation resources. The suite optimizes
use of host computer resources, while providing appropriate levels of
security and providing feedback to users when changes are made.

A Georgia Tech Research Corporation patent is pending on the suite. The
technology will be licensed to a company that Schneck is starting.


Economic Impact & Policy Studies

Issues such as defining the standard for information security represent
the theoretical side of the problem, said Dr. Philip Enslow, a professor
in the College of Computing.

"Security systems operate in an environment created by government
regulation, criminal law and the mores of society," he said. "These are
political issues that are important to business, society and government."

Educating stakeholders about security issues is Enslow's focus. He wants
to emphasize the importance of information security to economic growth.

"There's been a lot of focus on the Y2K problem, but after it is dealt
with, I think more businesses will start to realize that their economic
survival depends on the security of their information," he added.




-o-
Subscribe: mail majordomo@repsec.com with "subscribe isn".
Today's ISN Sponsor: Internet Security Institute [www.isi-sec.com]

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]