SRI's Worm Defense and Quarantine Research

Our recent research on Worm Quarantine has focused on understanding the impact of defense strategies on the propagation of worms. In this talk I will present our experience with formal methods and simulation. Both tools are applied to a collaborative worm defense, but they yield different insights and perspectives on the overall task of worm quarantine assessment. The formal methods allow higher level reasoning and more precise definitions of quarantine. The simulation studies model the real world in greater detail but are specific to certain assumptions and scenarios. At the end, I will spend some time on what we plan to do next and what upcoming projects provide the context of our research. We are open to collaborations and I would like to engage in a discussion with experts from universities and corporate research institutions.

Bio:

Linda Briesemeister is a Senior Research Engineer in the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International, a nonprofit R&D organization located in Silicon Valley. Her research interests include distributed algorithms applied to complex networks, mobile communication as found in ad hoc networking and inter-vehicle communication, and most recently, collaborative network security mechanisms to combat self-propagating code.