CT-T: A Laboratory Workbench for Security Research

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

NSF 0524096 CT-T: A Laboratory Workbench for Security Research Jay Lepreau This research develops new techniques and technologies that directly improve the study of security-related software systems. A primary barrier to studying both trustworthy and malicious software, especially software that runs on networks of computers, is providing realistic but controlled environments. The environments must provide not only strong containment guarantees, but also strong connections to the outside world, both for realism and to enable analysis and control of the systems under test. This research develops and deploys new technologies to make such environments publicly available, in three "timely" ways. The first is technology that allows distributed systems to be paused, checkpointed, and moved forward and backward in time. This research is leading to advancements in mixing real and virtual time in networked systems. The second way is a workbench for experiment workflows, allowing people to move forward and backward through the experimentation process. This is yielding advances in many areas including distributed system control, scientific workflow management, large-scale data storage, data analysis, and visualization. The third "timely" result is the regular deployment of this infrastructure as part of the popular Web-based "Emulab" testbed software. The project's tools are continuously deployed in online network testbeds, and delivered to the research, education, and security community for use and extension.