UCB, USC To Build (And Hack) A Model Internet

darksoulz writes "Associated Press stories from TheKansasCityChannel.com and TheChamplainChannel.com have an interesting report today. It appears that the U.S. Government has given a $5.5 million grant to the University of California, Berkley and the University of Southern California so that they can build a model of the internet, so they can hack it. They are trying to find better defenses against hacking, without breaking the real Internet. The first phase is scheduled to be completed by February."

Comments

Re:I'll do it for 1 million

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but you're pricing things according to how much they look like they'd cost to you. Not how much they'd cost to the people who are actually buying them.

If you get paid $50,000 a year by your employer (before taxes), how much do you think you cost to your employer? $50,000? Ha. Try $100k. They play various kinds of employment taxes, insurance, maybe a bit to a personnel management company... a good rule of thumb is that you cost 2x your salary to an employer. (Plus, you're taxed again on your end: a 50k salary means your take-home pay is 35k or whatever.)

Also, at a university, you have what's called "overhead". If a research group gets a $1million grant, how much of that grant money do you actually see? Well, at my university, the answer is something like 45%. The university takes a huge rakeoff of 55% to pay for buildings, infrastructure (e.g. networking, plumbing), deans, blah blah... that's where the university's income comes from.

So, I'm sorry to tell you, that if Fry's sells a computer for $1500, you need a much bigger grant to buy it. Try $6k.

The nature of government grants

[mystery_bowler]

For the last few years I've been developing software systems for law enforcement, so occassionally I pick up interesting bits of information about how government funding works. If you didn't hear about it - and not many people did - the Dept. of Homeland Security made a sort of "open call" (via the Dept. Of Justice, if I remember correctly) about a year or so ago. It was - more or less - an open invitation for vendors to propose innovative ideas to the DHS about fighting terrorism within the United States. The really interesting thing about the open call was that it was specifically worded to encourage "innovative" and "new" approaches. I joked at the time that I actually felt good about the open call...it seemed like the guys at the DHS were acknowledging that they didn't have a clue what to do and where looking for expert help on making things radically better.

I'd be interested to find out if the "model internet" was a proposed idea. In terms of government funding, $5 million isn't all that much, so I wouldn't be surprised to see if this was an idea pitched by people at UCB and USC during the open call. I'd heard that big names asking for reasonably small amounts of money were getting through pretty easily.

I tried to convince my company to pitch a variant of our crime analysis/trendspotting tools. Include a reference per recorded crime that indicates political or religious bias as the motive of the crime. Get a concentration of those - even if they are "lesser" crimes like vandalism or simple assualt - and you've got "smoke". And where there's "smoke"...

Re:I'll do it for 1 million

[metrazol]

The $5,000,000 is for a little thing called overhead. To pay the guys in the lab where I work to do this (yep, they're upstairs) costs salaries, benefits, insurance, retirement plans, and so on. Then, add in the cut that USC and every other middleman takes and you're left without too much cash. Labor is the big cost. A dozen G5's to tinker with? Don't bother getting a discount. Need a digital video camera to put "content" on your intranet? Here's $3,000. And so on...

GA Tech does this already!

[rbabb]

I'm a Graduating Senior at GA Tech and a professor here is already doing this! He has created a class called Network Security that focuses on mimicing the Internet in a completely unconnected network of systems. This allows for the students to learn how to use rootkits, honeynets, viruses, worms, buffer exploits, etc. The goal of the class is that if you explain how all this stuff works, you can also explain how to defend against it all in the real world. The nice part is that we are encouraged to try and break everything (not physically) with the understanding that if we do, we have to explain it later on. The class is only in it's 2nd semester and has only received a $100,000 grant from Cisco but it's definitely shaping up nicely. You can check it out some more by viewing HERE

here's the real scoop

[t_parker16]

all this speculating on what's involved, but the project is described in pretty good detail over at the ISI web site. (and so, its apparently not USC specifically but the usc information sciences institute):

http://www.isi.edu/stories/70.html

excerpt:

"The DETER testbed will consist of approximately 1,000 computers with multiple network interface cards, located off the actual Internet. Three permanent hardware clusters, or nodes, at UC Berkeley and at ISI's Southern California and Virginia facilities, will serve as the core of the system.

"This isolated mini-Internet will serve as a shared laboratory where researchers from government, industry and academia can test existing and new security technology, using a wide variety of attack techniques."

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

More info can be found here on the USC Information Sciences Institute website

Re:Is it dead already?

[CausticWindow]

Now you're giving Berkeley too much credit. LSD was synthesized by Albert Hoffman of the Sandoz Chemical Corporation of Basel, Switzerland in 1938.

They might've used a lot of LSD in Berkeley during the 60's, but it wasn't discovered there.