June 10, 2008, 9:47 PM CT

Dartmouth launches network security study

A team of Dartmouth scientists is preparing to launch a project that examines the campus wireless computer traffic in an effort to learn how the network is used and how to best maintain its security. The project is called the Dartmouth Internet Security Testbed, or DIST.

"Our campus environment is the perfect place for this project because we can examine live network activity at scale and in real time," says David Kotz, professor of computer science and the principal investigator on the DIST initiative. "We've worked in laboratory settings with controlled parameters; now it's time for a live, real-world test. For organizations that depend on their wireless networks, like we do, this research should prove invaluable." Kotz is working closely with Dartmouth's Peter Kiewit Computing Services Department.

DIST will develop and evaluate current sensing methods for monitoring the multiple wireless networks at Dartmouth to gather real-time data. Scientists hope to learn how to quickly discover patterns that may indicate malicious activity, and determine the best way to resolve those situations. Kotz explains that the scope and scale of this project is unique within the academic research community, and it will improve network security technology and practices for all Internet users. For example, DIST may help detect unauthorized access points, which can be used to steal users' passwords......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

June 4, 2008, 10:45 PM CT

Protecting Computer Networks From Internet Worms

Researchers may have found a new way to combat the most dangerous form of computer virus.

The method automatically detects within minutes when an Internet worm has infected a computer network.

Network administrators can then isolate infected machines and hold them in quarantine for repairs.

Ness Shroff, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Networking and Communications at Ohio State University, and colleagues describe their strategy in the current issue of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

They discovered how to contain the most virulent kind of worm: the kind that scans the Internet randomly, looking for vulnerable hosts to infect.

"These worms spread very quickly," Shroff said. "They flood the Net with junk traffic, and at their most benign, they overload computer networks and shut them down."

Code Red was a random scanning worm, and it caused $2.6 billion in lost productivity to businesses worldwide in 2001. Even worse, Shroff said, the worm blocked network traffic to important physical facilities such as subway stations and 911 call centers.

"Code Red infected more than 350,000 machines in less than 14 hours. We wanted to find a way to catch infections in their earliest stages, before they get that far," Shroff said......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

June 4, 2008, 10:27 PM CT

New wireless sensor network keeps tabs on the environment

Have you ever wondered what happens in the rainforest when no one is looking?.

Research in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Science may soon be able to answer that question. The departments of computing science and earth and atmospheric science have been working together to create a Wireless Sensor Network that allows for the clandestine data collection of environmental factors in remote locations and its monitoring from anywhere in the world where the Internet is available.

The research team, including Pawel Gburzynski, Mario Nascimento, and Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa, recently launched EcoNet, a functional model of a WSN for environmental monitoring in the display house in the University of Alberta's Agriculture/Forestry Centre. The display house hosts a small but feature-rich environment that mimics that of a tropical forest. Using a WSN, many sensors can continuously monitor factors like temperature and luminosity and will process, store and transmit data co-operatively and wirelessly with other sensors to generate data that can then be collected and made available to users virtually anywhere on the globe. The sensors represent a technology for scientists to monitor diverse phenomena continuously and inconspicuously.

Having the data continuously monitored by scientists substantially increases the chances of uncovering anomalies early enough to investigate them promptly and thoroughly......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 27, 2008, 10:22 PM CT

P4P system for efficient Internet usage

New Haven, Conn. A Yale research team has engineered a system with the potential for making the Internet work more efficiently, in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software providers can work cooperatively to deliver data.

The way people use the Internet has changed significantly over the past 10 years, making computers seem to run less efficiently and putting strain on the available bandwidth for transmitting data.

Since 1998, the percentage of Internet traffic devoted to the download and upload of large blocks of information using P2P software has increased from less than 10 percent to greater than 70 percent in a number of networks. By contrast, Web browsing now accounts for 20 percent and e-mail less than 5 percent of total Internet traffic, down from 60 and 10 percent respectively, in 1998.

Professors Avi Silberschatz, Y. Richard Yang, and Ph.D. candidate Haiyong Xie in Yales Department of Computer Science are part of a research team that is proposing an architecture called P4P which stands for provider portal for P2P applications to allow explicit and seamless communications between ISPs and P2P applications.

The P4P will both reduce the cost to ISPs and improve the performance of P2P applications as per a paper to be presented at ACM SIGCOMM 2008, a premier computer networking conference in August 2008 in Seattle......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 26, 2008, 8:43 PM CT

Interactive Web sites draw minds

The interactive look and feel of a corporate website could help shape positive perceptions about the organization if the site includes a likeable design and features that engage the target audience, particularly job seekers, as per media researchers.

S. Shyam Sundar, professor of film, video and media studies at Penn State, and Jamie Guillory, formerly an undergraduate student at Penn State, are trying to understand how interactivity in websites influences the public perception of an organization. In prior studies of websites of political candidates, Sundar had observed that the candidates were rated more positively if their site had some interactive features, even though the sites had no new content, and the candidates held the same policy positions. But too much interactivity tends to turn off people.

"Websites with low to medium levels of interactivity create positive perceptions but for medium to high interactivity, it actually falls down," said Sundar. "In general, too much interactivity is not desirable, and may lead to information overload".

Whatever effects, positive or negative, on a site, interactivity acts as a volume knob that boosts the effect, he explained, noting, "Just through the presence of such features, people attribute meaning to the content or the nature of the site"......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 19, 2008, 8:15 PM CT

Broadband access opens doors to networking

Proactive policies are needed to facilitate broadband Internet access and adoption in rural areas so that rural hospitals, schools and businesses can drive social and economic development and better position themselves to compete, say Penn State scientists in a recently released report from the Center for Rural Pennsylvania.

The report, "Broadband Internet Use in Rural Pennsylvania," examines broadband availability and adoption in four sectors -- health care, local government, education and business -- through case studies, interviews with key information-technology personnel and analysis of organizations' Web sites. While the report focuses on Pennsylvania, their recommendations hold true for any state with a large rural population, as per the researchers.

"Broadband services offer a huge opportunity for rural areas with significant payback in terms of economic development and community revitalization," said Amy Glasmeier, professor of geography and co-author of the report. "The Internet makes possible a whole range of processes which involve more than rapid access to information and which range from joint projects by municipalities and collaborations between schools to development of new business processes".

As per the researchers, while the number of rural users of broadband Internet services has been steadily increasing, access to broadband is not universal in rural areas, and in some places, dial-up remains the only affordable option. While dial-up allows for electronic access to information, its slower speed and lower bandwidth capacity limit organizations from developing Internet-enabled processes and collaborations -- what the scientists distinguish as "transformative" uses......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 18, 2008, 9:54 PM CT

NIST tool helps Internet master top-level domains

At the request of a worldwide Internet organization, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed an algorithm that may guide applicants in proposing new top-level domains the last part of an Internet address, such as.com, that people type in navigating the Web. As new top-level domains are added to the familiar.com,.info and.net, the algorithm* checks whether the newly proposed name is confusingly similar to existing ones by looking for visual likenesses in its appearance. Having visually distinct top-level domain names may help avoid confusion in navigating the ever-expanding Internet and combat fraud, by reducing the potential to create malicious look-alikes:.C0M with a zero instead of.COM, for instance.

Later this year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plans to launch the process for proposing a new round of generic top-level domains (gTLDs), strings such as.net,.gov and.org meant to indicate organizations or interests. In preparing for newly proposed gTLDs, ICANN reached out to various algorithm developers, including NISTs Paul E. Black, as among those engaged to provide an open, objective, and predictable mechanism for assessing the degree of visual confusion in gTLDs.

Blacks algorithm compares a proposed gTLD with other TLDs and generates a score based on their visual similarities. For example, the domain.C0M scores an 88 percent visual similarity with the familiar.COM. The resulting scores may help indicate whether the newly proposed domain name looks too much like existing ones......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 30, 2008, 6:39 PM CT

A CluE in the Search for Data-Intensive Computing

The Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a solicitation for proposals for the new Cluster Exploratory (CluE) initiative. The CluE program was announced in February as a part of a relationship between Google, IBM and NSF. NSF hopes this initiative will help lead to innovations in the field of data-intensive computing, as well as serve as an example for future collaborations between the private sector and the academic computing research community.

CluE will provide NSF-funded scientists access to software and services running on a Google-IBM cluster to explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive computing. NSF will allocate cluster computing resources for a broad range of proposals which will explore the potential of this technology to contribute to science and engineering research and produce applications which promise to benefit society as a whole.

"The software and services that run on these data clusters provide a brand new paradigm for highly parallel, highly reliable distributed computing, particularly for processing massive amounts of data," said Jeannette Wing, assistant director for CISE at NSF. Academic scientists have expressed a need for access to similar computing resources that will allow them to engage and explore this emerging and pervasive model of computing......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 30, 2008, 6:15 PM CT

Hackers learn to threaten computer hardware

AS IF computer viruses and worms arent enough of a nuisance, malicious hardware, which will be much more difficult to detect, could soon become a threat too.

Today, computer viruses, which are programs downloaded either as an email attachment or when someone visits a website, are responsible for most computer attacks. Hackers use them to gain control of a computer so that they can press-gang it into sending spam or downloading more malicious software, such as a keystroke logger, which can record credit card details and passwords typed in by the user.

Anti-virus (AV) software monitors a computer for signs of a virus, such as chunks of telltale code. To fight back, hackers write new viruses that use different code, or bury the code deeper in the operating system where the AV software isnt programmed to look. So AV firms and hackers are locked in an arms race, continually trying to outdo each other.

Soon hackers could up the ante even further. Samuel King and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown that they could also gain control of a computer by adding malicious circuits to its processor. Because these circuits interfere with the computer at a deeper level than a virus, they effectively operate below the radar of AV software......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 17, 2008, 7:37 PM CT

Wanted: Forty-thousand More Health IT Professionals

Study by OHSU expert says a 40 percent hike in IT workforce will be needed to move U.S. healthcare toward a paperless system that controls costs and reduces medical errors.

If the U.S. healthcare system moves toward wider adoption of advanced information technology systems to control health care costs, reduce medical errors and improve patient care, it will need at least 40,000 additional health IT professionals - or almost 40 percent more than U.S. hospitals now are estimated to employ.

That is the finding of an analytical report presented today, at a meeting on Capitol Hill of the Steering Committee on Telehealth and Healthcare Informatics, by William Hersh, M.D., professor and chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University.

The meeting was moderated by U.S. Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., author of a bill, H.R. 1467, addressing the need to train more health IT professionals, which the House passed recently and that is awaiting consideration in the Senate.

"I commend Dr. Hersh for his research on healthcare IT workforce issues," said Rep. Wu. "His findings further justify the need for my 10,000 Trained by 2010 Act, which provides funds for healthcare IT education. A workforce trained in healthcare IT is essential to bringing greater quality and efficiency to the healthcare industry"......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source