Stopping Malware Before It Hits

SpudGunMan writes "John Lockwood, Ph.D, an assistant professor of computer science at Washington University, and the graduate students that work in his research laboratory, have developed a hardware platform called the Field-programmable Port Extender (FPX) that scans for malware transmitted over a network and filters out unwanted data."

Comments

A great idea, but.....

[thewiz]

Who does the reprogramming of the device; the end user or the company that make the device? For security, I'd rather it be the end user.
Also, shouldn't they make a cheap version for home users since those are the machines that are most vulnerable?

Re:A great idea, but.....

[LostCluster]

I think the concept is for it to be the device itself, making its decision based on patterns that just plain shouldn't appear in normal traffic. If people all over the world are sending the exact same long message into your network, something's up and it's likely not good.

- If the same e-mail attachment comes through your network a few hundred times, it must be a virus.
- If the same kilobyte-long web address keeps getting requested, it must be a worm.
- If the same messages are headed to your NetBIOS ports, it must be the pop-up-message spam of the week. In fact, if somebody wants to deliver any message any kind to all of your ports one-by-one, it must be the exploit of the week.

This seems to be all about patern matching... the device isn't meant to replace your firewall and antivirus systems, but to be faster than them and to take off the work load of having to identify this week's worm when it comes in for the 34,939th time. This might even be useful for ISPs to cut off D-DOS attempts before entering the major traffic exchages so that less of traffic makes it to the victim's bandwidth pipe.

Nifty.

[MoriarGryphon]

Sounds like a nifty piece of hardware. Put one at the front of your network, and reduce internal bandwidth wastage from propogation of virii/worms inward. Even if all your stuff is patched, this could help keep all your servers from having to listen to the worms and script kiddies several hundred times a second. ;>

Treating the symptoms, not the disease

[Dark Lord Seth]

I suggest enlightening the users about malware while they download it. Let's go for the Pavlov effect and hook the hardware platform up to a pellet gun, tazer and a program which mails the squid logs of the current day of said victim to his/her mother/SO. Users learn so much easier that way...

Oh, great.

[volkerdi]

While in theory this is a great idea, in practice it's likely to be less great. I commonly get sent reports that .ZIP files used in ZipSlack (which have never seen a Windows machine in handling by me), are infected with viruses. This is because "signatures" thought by virus scanning companies to be unique are a lot less unique than they imagined.

If something like this is ever implemented on a wide scale, expect the system to refuse to allow random non-malware files to be used, transferred, or handled, in those cases where they happen to match a banned bit-pattern. Files and emails might even be silently dropped with no notification at all, depending on the implementation (and with an eye to history).

Re:Oh, great.

[rgmoore]

It seems to me that this is just more evidence that computer systems will wind up looking like biology. First we had viruses and similar infectious things. Now people are trying to create the machine equivalent of an immune system. The problem is that in the process they're likely to rediscover all of the problems that our immune system causes as well as the benefits.

This particular case is quite similar to allergies in the natural immune system. It's an overly aggressive response to an essentially harmless signal. The big problem is that virus and worm scanners are going to be succeptible to the computer equivalent of autoimmune disease; they'll start thinking that essential system files have been corrupted and try to wipe out something really important. I just hope they never develop the computerized equivalent of leukemia.

it's the freeware, stupid

[Potor]

Indeed. Funny how malware does not seem to infest products we actually pay for. The desire to find free software leads us to download products that are more and more iffy. The key is not detecting malware, for malware will always be one step ahead. The key is carefully screening what we will download, searching out reviews, reading the EULA before the install, and basically being intelligent.

I am not against freeware -- far from it. However, I would say that there is freeware addiction out there that opens the doors to malware. Moreover, I am not against this product; it will certainly be helpful. Yet, those who put their trust in yet another algorithm will certainly get bit again, albeit in some other way.

cheers, potor

Sounds great.

[rune.w]

Quoting from the abstract of the paper:

FPGA logic is used to implement circuits that track the state of Internet flows and search for regular expressions and fixed-strings that appear in the content of packets.

So apparently this hardware can only recognize patterns programmed beforehand (which makes a lot of sense). However, a problem would arise whenever an original piece of malware is released into the net. I mean, how do they plan to identify and program new strings into the machine before the systems behind it are infected? Worms tend to expand fairly quickly...

Further insight is always welcome.

R.

Isn't this just a network censorship device?

[Bookwyrm]

I am rather surprised at the commentary so far on this device, given the usual tone of responses made on slashdot that I have seen.

This device appears to be, at heart, a box that is put in along side the routers to filter out content that the owner of the device does not want to be sent over the network. It is capable of looking for specific patterns of data and blocking the transfer of the data based on that in real time.

Is this not precisely what one would use to filter out, say, unwanted political documents going in/out of China? To, say, spot a specific MP3 file being traded on a P2P network and stop it?

Other comments seem to suggest people think this might actually be a workable, good idea -- guess folks are finally realizing that the Internet cannot route around all forms of censorship after all, if they think this will work.

Stopping network junk "on the wire"

[mattbee]

After speaking to one of the chaps behind ddos.com I'm very excited by this kind of emerging technology: essentially ethernet/fibre "filters" which can scan and dump "unwanted" traffic without a noticeable lag on the network. I'm less excited by how much it costs at the moment: $18k list price for one of the 100Mb boxes at DDoS.com, but I suspect as competition opens up, the waffle about exciting and complicated patented technologies will give way to a decent and open discussion about the best algorithms for doing this.

As an example of the current waffle on this topic, the white paper at ddos.com promises in one of their upcoming *cough* products a wire-speed spam filter which is 100% accurate and needs no training. Sure, sure... it's this ridiculous claim which calls into question the "zero training" aspect of their DDoS prevention-- I'm sure some configuration and known "signature" patterns of abusive traffic will help matters.

I'm not here to pick on ddos.com, I'm sure they have an excellent and useful product. But since they are one of a very small number of people with such a product, they are prone to making wild claims and charging extortionate fees. I'm convinced a Linux/BSD kernel module could achieve the same effect and I'd be very interested to see the algorithms, training and so on needed to achieve it. But for the moment we're still subject to these pretty wild claims without much in the way of algorithmic detail.