New Ideas

The National Science Foundation funded GridSec effort at the University of Southern California. The GridSec project is devoted to protecting pervasive, cluster, peer-to-peer, and Grid computing environments. Several research fronts are being attacked with intensive simulation, testbed construction, and NetShield software development.

Impact

Project Staff

• Dr. Kai Hwan, Principal Investigator at USC
• Dr. Ellis Horowitz, Co-PI at USC
• Dr. B. Clifford Neuman, Co-PI at ISI
• Dr. Tatyana Ryutov

• Li Zhou

International Collaborators: Prof. Michel Cosnard of INRIA, France Dr. Zhiwei Xu of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Objectives

• Remove computing - Offering a new trust model
• GridSec offers distributed intelligence in trust management on top of Globus, AppLes, NimRod etc.
• Dynamic grid resource allocation optimized with respect to computing power, security demand, and cost limit
• Benefiting E-commerce, digital government, public safety, and global economy over the Internet using GridSec-based VPN tunneling

Approach

GridSec for protecting distributed resources:

• Security-assured resource allocation (SARA)
• Local resources fortified with NetShield library
• Remote processing through GridSec VPN tunneling

• Generating anomaly detection rules to build IDS
• Adaptive intrusion response through risk assessment
• Priority defense against DDoS and flood attacks

• Testing SARA and NetShield on GridSec testbed
• Optimize the GridSec VPN architecture
• Explore wireless Grid computing technology

Current Plan

The researchers at ISI are investigating the policy-controlled data mining for intrusion detection. This approach includes three steps:

1. Adaptive gathering and encoding of audit data remotely.
2. Adaptive pre-processing of audit data. Use standard logging tools but support adaptive selection of most influential system features.
3. Adaptive Data mining. Provide advise/predictions for classifiers based on the info observed by the GAA-API - Generic Authorization and Access-control API and encoded in the security policy.