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

In ten years...

[sandbenders]

In ten years everyone will wonder why USC and Berkley produced all of the decade's best crackers. This project will result in three things:

1. Good dissertations for CS PhDs.
2. More secure software, which will rarely be implemented and even more rarely be implemented well.
3. A whole bunch of research assistants who think they are l33t h4x0rs. And some of them will be right.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the real point here is to make a testbed where they can unleash worms and then try different techniques to try and trace, contain, stop, and prevent them. Not to actually attract hackers. They will be the hackers, do the hacking, etc. Also to play with DDOS attacks and whatnot, without saturating any existing networks. I think the operative term is hacking a model 'internet' not a machine on the internet.

Just offer prizes to hackers

[G4from128k]

I'm not sure how they plan to "model" the internet, but I would argue that the internet is its own best model. Anything else will lack some exloits present in the "real" net while have other exploits absent in the real net (bugs in the model's software).

I would take the $5.5 million and divide it up into $5000 prizes that are payable to any hacker that demonstrates and documents a hack on the real net. The profs and grad students could ajudicate the prize giving. They would find at least 1100 exploits this way (fewer if they have to pay those pesky grad students or usurious university accounting department overhead rates).

If letting hackers profit from hacking the actual internet is too scary/illegal, then the university could create a small publically exposed network running a variety of apps, OS, etc.