PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Taking the concept of the neighborhood crime watch to the Internet, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., have come up with an automated reporting system to cope with the millions of attacks that plague the computer systems of the Department of Energy each year. Now deployed to protect the DOE and affiliated universities and research organizations, the Federated Model for Cyber Security is ready for immediate adoption by businesses and associations with multiple locations.
“Large companies need this. For any system that is on the Internet, it’s very natural to be part of normal scanning and hacking. Now if intelligence is shared at all, it’s often shared too late,” said Mike Skwarek, deputy CIO and cyber-security program manager at ANL.
In the past, although one location might protect itself, information about attacks would be shared with other locations only through human interaction. The ANL’s federated system enables the automatic trusted exchange of information about attacks, so that cooperating sites can be alerted to the sources of future attacks and pre-emptively block them. Members of the group share public encryption keys to access a common repository containing attack information.
“When site A finds someone doing reconnaissance, it lets the site share that hostile information—the IP address—with other trusted sites. Site B gets the information about the IP address and puts in a block,” said Skwarek.
The system also shares and blacklists domain names of hostile entities, which can blunt a hacking technique known as “fast flux,” in which hackers rotate IP addresses randomly from a single domain name. The technique is used by botnets to hide phishing and malware delivery sites. The federated system sends probes from the domain name to a “black hole,” from which they cannot emerge to cause trouble. The ability to share hostile e-mail addresses and Web URLs will be added shortly.
For sites of different organizations to establish trust between each other, human interaction, either face-to-face of over the telephone, still would be needed. “There’s a vetting process,” said Skwarek. The human touch is also needed to check log files to make sure the crime prevention technique is not generating false positives or impacting operations.
Skwarek said the federated system is ready for adoption for interested parties beyond the research community. “It’s ready right now. Anybody who wishes to set up a federation could do it today,” said Skwarek.
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