Homework #7 - The Threat of Worms - Due Thursday Feb 13, 1PM
Turn in this assignment via email (vern@berkeley.edu)
by the due date, with the term Homework in the Subject.
Read the paper
How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time, Stuart Staniford, Vern Paxson and Nicholas Weaver, USENIX Security 2002
Briefly write up your views of:
- What are the main contributions of this paper?
- What parts of the paper do you find unclear? (optional)
- What parts of the paper are questionable? (That is, you think a
conclusion may be wrong, an approach or evaluation technically
flawed, or data ill-presented.)
- Sketch a technique that could be used to detect that
an unknown worm is
currently propagating. (Here, "unknown" means you don't know
in advance what its exploit/spreading behavior looks like.)
Analyze the false positives and
false negatives that you expect the detector would exhibit.
- Sketch an approach for defending against
a propagating worm (or preventing
its propagation in the first place). It's fine to posit
an approach of your own rather than researching schemes others
have proposed, though if you do the latter, include citations.
It's also fine for your defense to make use of the detector
you developed for the previous question.
Explain how well you believe the defense would work in terms
of both efficacy and collateral damage.