Recruiting Friendly Botnets To Counter Bad Botnets

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a University of Washington project aiming to marshal swarms of 'good' computers to take on botnets. Their approach — called Phalanx — uses its distributed network to shield a server from DDoS attacks. Instead of that server being accessed directly, all information must pass through the swarm of 'mailbox' computers, which are swapped around randomly and only pass on information to the shielded server when it requests it. Initially the researchers propose using the servers in networks such as Akamai as mailboxes; ultimately they would like to piggyback the good-botnet functionality onto BitTorrent."

Comments

Re:What kind of mental cripple thinks this shit up

[zedlander]

From TFA:

Their system, called Phalanx, uses its own large network of computers

Chill the flip out, man. They're not taking over your computer.