F.A.Q.
Q: What is the purpose of NetSec ?
A: NetSec is a project group at the University of Pittsburgh. We are developing techniques to maintain Quality of Service for a network in any circumstances. Adverse circumstances include Denial Of Service attacks, hardware/software faults, etc... We are currently focusing on maintaining adequate Quality of Service during a Denial of Service attack.
Q: What is a Denial of Service attack ?
A: A denial of service attack is a software based attack designed to render unusable a network. For more details please see the documentation link.
Q: Why do we care about Denial of Service attacks ?
A: Many major companies have and Web based front end to sell their products. If a malicious attacker is able to shut down customers' access to that website, the company will lose money and customer confidence. Amazon.com suffered such an attack in February 2002, losing millions in revenue.
Q: What kind of resources does it take to launch a DoS attack ?
A: One personal computer can bring down a network of any size. The attacker will infiltrate other computers, and the infiltrated computers will infiltrate even more computers and so forth. This process can continue until the attacker has sufficient resources or is detected. The attack will be launched from all the hijacked computers simultaneously and will be of a magnitude exponentially greater than the one PC that initially began the attack.
Q: What else are you working on ?
A: We are also working on resource management techniques dealing with queue allocation and so forth...
Q: What does that have to do with network security ?
A: In order to mitigate attacks on a network, we are taking a two pronged approach. We will combine resource management with network defense techniques to create a new defense. We hope that the hybrid defense will assure better QoS than the sum of its parts.