Good Network Worms Made Simple

grabbag writes "Dave Aitel is pitching new technology to create "nematodes," or beneficial network worms for use in large businesses. The idea is to set up a new language and structure to create "strictly controlled" good worms on the fly. A research-type demo was given as the Hack in the Box conference where Aitel talked about a world where "strictly controlled" nematodes are used by ISPs, government organizations and large companies to show significant cost savings."

Comments

Intelligent managed networks?

[jeffs72]

It would be cool if you could have these worms each perform certain functions (one to better manage spanning-tree for instance, so when a link fails spanning tree rebuilds faster for example) with some sort of AI, or really even a really good base line vs current activity comparison machine, to intelligently manage WANs and LANs.

Be nice to have worms that watch for machines all the sudden opening ports that they never have before, all the sudden opening up multicast or what not, or even finding that bad machine sending out bad frames on the network.

I can see a lot of flexibility with this, particularly if they are written in some sort of open source scripting language. I guess what I'm getting at is that they could be sort of like an open source distributed IDS/IDP system.

Granted you can do all these things now with a mix of expensive monitoring tools and a lot of config work with tools like ethereal and mrtg and big brother/big sister, etc. But this might be an easier way to do the same thing.

neato

and here is a link

[mustafap]

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/16.28.html#subj3