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

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"...

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."