On Dec 26, 2006, at 4:19 PM, coderman wrote:
the only example that comes to mind is distributed / collaborative
anomaly detection systems which become more robust with a larger
number of entities and interactions to observe.
While scale introduced complexity in terms of opex and maintenance,
I'm not sure it carries the distinction of qualitative complexity
implied by the previous poster.
Perhaps a better example would be an anomaly-detection system which
correlates multiple types of telemetry with differing paradigms (say,
NetFlow alongside syslog) in order to increase the fidelity of
detection/classification/traceback/analysis.
Another example would be introducing antispoofing functionality into
a network infrastructure by deploying uRPF, IP Source Verify, iACLs,
et. al. - this does introduce more complexity into the system, but it
has very real security benefits both for the deploying organization
as well as other organizations who in some fashion interconnect to
one degree or another with the deploying organization (i.e., everyone
on the public Internet, business partners interconnected via extranet
WAN links or VPN tunnels, etc.). Enabling telemetry export/
collection/analysis, deploying iACLS/rACLs/CoPP, enabling telemetry
export to collection/analysis systems, and many other similar
activities are also examples of increased complexity leading to
better security.
As an aside, Slammer did not in fact take down 'much of the
Internet'; some SP infrastructure was affected, but the vast majority
of networks affected were enterprise networks.
http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2003/sapphire/sapphire.html
http://www.beyondbgp.net/pubs/2003/bbgp_iwdc03.pdf
http://momo.lcs.mit.edu/slammer/
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~zmao/Papers/SPECTS06-camera.pdf
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