The DETER Project
Scientific, Safe and Simple CyberSecurity Experimentation
Description:
As the Internet has become pervasive and our critical infrastructures inextricably tied to information systems, the risk for economic, social, and physical disruption due to the insecurities of information systems has increased immeasurably. Over the past 10 years there has been increased investment in research on cyber security technologies by U.S.
government agencies and industry.
However, a large-scale deployment of effective security technology is lacking. One important reason for this deficiency is the lack of an experimental infrastructure and rigorous scientific methodologies for development and testing next-generation cyber security technologies.
To address these shortcomings, the DETER project is creating the necessary infrastructure – testbeds, tools, and supporting processes – for national-scale experimentation on emerging security research and advanced development technologies for cyber defense.
The DETER testbed, funded by the US Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation has been operational since 2004. Today it hosts 400+ nodes at USC/ISI and UC Berkeley, and serves more than 1,200 users and 150 projects from all over the world. It is used for academic research and teaching, and for testing commercial products. It is accompanied by a set of experimentation tools and products that make experiment setup, monitoring and control easy even at large scales. The DETER project has
further made advances in supporting very large scale experiments via testbed federations, and in supporting safe experimentation with risky code.
The next generation of the DETER project plans major improvements in experimental processes to guarantee experimental validity, repeteabiiity and portability. It further plans improvements in operations to support an order of magnitude larger experiments than today.
Finally, it plans to build effective community tools for exchange of code, data and ideas between its users which fosters closer collaborations. This talk will describe the current state of the DETER testbed, and our new efforts aimed at advancing the science of cyber security experimentation.
