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Military Spends $4.4M To Supersize Net Monitoring
coondoggie writes "Bigger, better, faster, more are the driving themes behind the advanced network monitoring technology BBN Technologies is building for the military.
The high-tech firm got a $4.4 million contract today from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop novel, scalable attack detection algorithms; a flexible and expandable architecture for implementing and deploying the algorithms; and an execution environment for traffic inspection and algorithm execution. The network monitoring system is being developed under DARPA's Scalable Network Monitoring program which seeks to bolt down network security in the face of cyber attacks that have grown more subtle and sophisticated."
That sounds like a lot, but it did come with fries.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
$4.4 million for a system to detect what one person getting paid nothing will circumvent within days/hours/minutes of implementation.
to cater the meetings to discuss the project.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
It doesn't actually sound like all that much to me. Frankly, I'm surprised that they're not spending 10x as much already. Of course, maybe they are...
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$.4.4 million? So is that like $440k? $400,000.40?
Considering the requirements laid out in TFA, I am exceedingly dubious that they will come up with anything for this price tag. Also note this same company got $13 Million for a program to quickly translate documents for the military. I'm guessing that one will also go nowhere. Security and Translation are two notoriously difficult things to get right.
So much for ordering off the dollar menu.
They make their own pr0n at Abu Ghraib.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
In Soviet America, net surfs YOU!
to develop novel, scalable attack detection algorithms
'novel' just doesn't carry the same meaning anymore. USPTO is a prime example.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
If there's one thing the government hasn't learned yet it is paying money to some company about something they don't understand is generally a bad idea.
It's all fun and games until some kid from Finland renders your new-bought toy obsolete.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
We also need to keep in mind that the US Department of Defense has its own networks some which it relies on even during battle. While I'm sure that the presence of this technology will encourage other agencies to use it intrusively on public networks, this technology isn't in itself compromising the privacy of the citizens of the US.
Well DARPA invented the internet (not to mention a large number of other achievements that are significantly more sophisticated). What are your qualifications, Mr. Smartguy, for forming an opinion on what can be done?
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
The article doesn't say, but it seems logical that they would want the US military network to be able to handle both an attack like the one launched earlier this year against Georgia's internet infrastructure (likely by Russia) and the almost-certainly Russian-based one during actual armed conflict this week.
DoD has a budget of about $439.3 billion and DARPA gets $3.2 billion of that (according to Wikipedia). $4.4 million doesn't sound like that much out of that kind of budget, but I'd be interested in what they actually come up with. Doubt the general public will see anything created by this project for at least 10 years, though.
Wrong, wrong, wrong... Net Monitoring is one of those disciplines that has no end. Hackers, viruses, and Trojans are ever changing. New threats, sites, and IPs appear every day. It is much like chess: your opponent makes a move, you counter it, and he makes yet another move. No one's network is without its threats, no matter the manufacturer or operating system.
What do I base my statements on? I do network security full-time for about 50,000 users.
Is this guys a bot? I've seen this exact comment in at least one other thread.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
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This article asks for nothing specific other than 'algorithms' to detect things. They didn't say anything like network (AI) behavioral based IDS. Nothing new here, move along.
from the article "New technologies and applications provide new attack routes and have made traditional signature-based and anomaly detection-based defensive measures inadequate in both speed and sensitivity, BBN added." Anomaly detection is mentioned. They claim that signature based and other techniques they have tried didn't work quite to what they wanted. Nothing new in that. IDS have never been perfect.
As posted by CmdrTaco:
$.4.4 million
That's not off topic. The post as it reads right now is "$.4.4 million". Sure, we can assume it is 4.4 million because it seems like an nonsensical number otherwise, but this is very unclear and should be corrected.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Both of these services are located on the wrong side of a hostile network and are woefully inaccurate when really understanding the content of the document is necessary.
Ok people, is it time yet? We need to encrypt ALL traffic.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That is lots of fundamental research we are talking about. I am no expert in network monitoring, but 4.4M to solve the following problems seems like peanuts:
Probability of detection of malicious traffic greater than 99% per attack launched
While some types of traffic are obviously not ham (say, spoofed IPs or syn scans), assigning intent to raw data flows requires nothing less than strong AI. Think of spam - anybody can fool a spam filter, no matter what filter, given enough time and motivation. You can also fool the human reading the mail, for that matter...
A false alarm rate while monitoring traffic of not more than one false alarm per day.
This makes a whitelist approach a lot harder. My guess is that any decent system will flag many, many things, and prioritize some over others. That way it is up to the network operator to dig deeper or not into each individual incident, using the program's classification as a starting point. I have no idea why email programs don't allow you to rank messages on "perceived spamminess" - it would make digging for false positives and negatives a lot easier...
Support capabilities at conventional gateway line speeds of 1Gbps in Phase I of the contract, while Phase II will demonstrate the scalability of this capability at gateway line speeds of 100Gbps.
This part, together with the "very high scalability" requirement, is the icing on the cake. It is impossible to detect complex threats in real-time, so the best bet would be to layer defenses. Very fast reflexes for certain behavior (say, DDOS), longer mulling times for patterns that are more deeply hidden (say, a covert channel somewhere).
In any case, 4.4M is peanuts to meet these goals at full strength. The most probable outcome is some fundamental research, partial successes, and another grant in a few years (possibly to a different team) to try to get further along the track.
Ever work on a big project? One that was over due by a significant amount? Yeah, easily $4M.
That amount is like the military paying someone to think about it and give them a paper on it. I've been on civilian-side government projects that were well beyond $4M. Sounds like someone got a "sure, toss some cash at it and see what happens" approval, but not an official "this is a priority, make it so" approval.
Now, $40M is where we start to see some serious thinking about the issue. Yeah, it's an arbitrary amount, but warfare grade network inspection and defense? $40M would be a drop in the bucket for R&D for such a system. $4M is a joke.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
That's such a tiny budget that it in effect suggests that no real work is being done at all.
These days building a new high school can eat up more than 16 million dollars. Net security and monitoring migh call for a multi billion dollar project.
Can we name it Skynet?
Not only that, guess who had the ARPANET contract? BBN. I dealt with them for years, and they are a very capable organization. Chances are they can deliver what they say.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Actually it sounds like far too little.
The root of the problem is that the USA has been pissing everyone else off for the better part of a century. Were it not for that key fact, the military probably wouldn't be afraid of everyone everywhere, including their own citizens.
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I think the military really understands how big a threat cyber attacks are/will be. Thank Jebus.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I wouldn't want people's lives depending on either of those two if I was in the military. They're at "send three and fourpence we're going to a dance" levels of accuracy at the moment.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it