News Highlight

Title: Untangling Attribution: Understanding the Requirements for Network Attribution

Speaker: Susan Landau, Department of Computer Science, Harvard University (http://privacyink.org/)

Date: April 18th, 2012

Time: 1:30pm--3:00pm

Location: Babbio 122

Special Note: A reception will be held at the Atrium of the Babbio Center right after the distinguished seminar. Everyone is welcome to join.

Abstract:

As a result of increasing spam, DDoS attacks, cybercrime, and data exfiltration from corporate and government sites, there have been multiple calls for an Internet architecture that enables better network attribution at the packet layer.  The intent is for a mechanism that links a packet to some packet level personally identifiable information. But cyberattacks and cyberexploitations are more different than they are the same. One result of these distinctions is that packet-level attribution is neither as useful nor as necessary as it would appear.  In this talk, I analyze the different types of Internet-based attacks, and observe the role that currently available alternatives to attribution already play in deterrence and prosecution. I focus on the particular character of multi-stage network attacks, in which machine A penetrates and ``takes over'' machine B, which then does the same to machine C, etc. and consider how these types of attacks might be traced, and observe that any technical contribution can only be contemplated in the larger regulatory context of various legal jurisdictions.

This represents joint work with David Clark of MIT.

Biography:

Susan Landau is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Computer Science Department at Harvard University. She was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and held faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. She has worked on security, cryptography, and policy, including surveillance and digital-rights management issues. Landau is the author of "Surveillance or Security?" The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies" (MIT Press, 2011), coauthor, with Whitfield Diffie, of "Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption" (MIT Press, 1998; rev. 2007), and the author of numerous computer science and public policy papers, as well as op-eds on cybersecurity and encryption policy. She is a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and serves on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Landau was a fellow at the Radclie Institute for Advanced Study, is a recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, and is a fellow of both the AAAS and the ACM. She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.