CS COLLOQ, Liviu Iftode, Jan. 23

[Erna Amerman]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department of Computer Science
The Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science
201 North Goodwin Avenue
Urbana, Illinois 61801-2302  USA


COMPUTER SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM
  (and Graduate Seminar)


   Building Defensive Architectures Using Backdoors

				
     Liviu Iftode
     Computer Science
     Rutgers University

     January 23 (Monday), 2006 at 4:00 p.m.			
     1404 Siebel Center for Computer Science
				

As computers are becoming ubiquitous, more human activities will depend 
on their availability and survivability to failures and attacks. In the 
face of increasing systems complexity, attack sophistication and  user 
impatience, human intervention for their monitoring, repairing, and 
recovery is often too costly and critically  slow.

In this talk, I introduce our approach of building defensive computer 
systems capable of performing healing activities on themselves 
automatically. This can be achieved by augmenting their hardware and 
software with trusted intelligent backdoors. An intelligent backdoor can 
be programmed to perform observation, detection and intervention on a 
computer system automatically and without involving its operating 
system. It can also communicate with other backdoors for cooperative 
healing. Backdoors can be realized in hardware using a programmable 
network interface or in software over a virtual machine monitor. In this 
talk, I present two defensive architectures. The first one uses a 
hardware backdoor implementation to perform remote healing across a 
cluster of Internet servers. The second architecture uses a software 
backdoor implemented on a virtual machine platform to automatically 
detect and contain rootkit attacks.


Bio:
Liviu Iftode is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer 
Science at Rutgers University, New Jersey.  He received his Ph.D. and 
M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1998 and 
1993, respectively.  His research interests include distributed systems, 
operating systems, mobile networking and pervasive computing.  Most of 
his work has been conducted with his students in the Distributed 
Computing (DISCO) Laboratory at Rutgers (http://discolab.rutgers.edu). 
More information can be found at http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~iftode.


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