http://mae.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=OnlineArticles&SubSection=Display&PUBLICATION_ID=32&ARTICLE_ID=120711 [OK, its a borderline press-release, but its rather interesting way to look at things. - WK] OCTOBER 1, 11:26 EDT SAN DIEGO -- Computer scientists at the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego needed advanced Internet security software. They found their solution from Promia Inc. in San Francisco. SPAWAR officials awarded a $7 million contract to Promia to test and deliver twenty Advanced Internet Security systems, Promia officials announced Sept. 27. The Internet security system to be delivered to the U.S. Navy is code-named the "Intelligent Agent Security Module" (IASM) and is to be deployed as a primary means of providing information analysis and protection on ships and shore-based facilities. This procurement represents Phase III of a U.S. Navy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program and compliments a multi-year research and development effort by Promia and the U.S. Navy to design and build the systems, Promia officials say. IASM addresses known problems in intrusion-detection devices such as false alarms and the inability to detect new types of attacks. Navy experts "will be working closely with the community of interest in this area to ensure a conclusive, easily displayed and understood, highly interactive system," says Lt. Frank Ottaviano, the SPAWAR information assurance project engineer. IASM is a supercomputer-based system that uses a secure component architecture based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture -- better known as CORBA. The IASM manages how network-security software detects and validates internally and externally generated network incidents, Promia officials say. It system detects known attacks using various techniques to correlate single and multiple events, while it detects novel attacks using analytic techniques to identify aberrant behaviors. IASM also includes a visualization component to help operators understand complex events with selectable levels of response suitable to the needs of the U.S. Navy and other branches of the U.S. Department of Defense, Promia officials say. Beowulf cluster machines, which are supercomputers platforms developed at NASA, support the analytic modules of IASM. "This makes it feasible to expose aberrant behaviors even within the sea of normal traffic," says Promia Principal Analyst Dr. Stephen Neville. "Traditionally hackers have had the luxury of hiding their actions within the large volumes of network messages. The combination of advanced analytic techniques with low-cost scalable supercomputers seriously hinders the attackers ability to hide." Promia's work "is significant because it is based on a reusable framework for automatically assessing large amounts of sensor data, simultaneously, across multiple networks, providing pattern matching and novel attack detection," says John Mullen, Promia's president and chief executive officer. Mullen notes the importance of applying emerging technologies such as fuzzy logic and neural networks to cyber attacks. Fuzzy logic refers to a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on reasoning amid uncertainty or incomplete data. [...] - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Oct 04 2001 - 04:25:46 PDT