SGER: National Malware Collaboratory Investigation (NMCI)

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is carrying out a series of activities intended to explore and catalyze the creation of a National Malware Collaboratory The National Malware Collaboratory brings together two synergistic innovations ? a national-scale distributed cyberinfrastructure and a catalytic academic/industry/government consortium ? to provide order-of-magnitude improvement to the nation?s defenses against cyber-malware. The Collaboratory recognizes the changing nature of the malware threat: from yesterday?s simple worms and viruses to polymorphic, evolvable, broad-spectrum attacks. It recognizes the expanding target of the malware threat, from yesterday?s web servers to today?s critical financial networks, SCADA systems, and national security infrastructure. It responds to these challenges by creating an environment and structure for academia, industry, and government to engage in large-scale, proactive, collaborative malware defense research, and to rapidly transition research results to practical development and deployment. Currently the project is carrying out three early activities central to the establishment of the NMC: 1) Research, design, and design validation critical to the technical structure of the NMC-CI itself. Key foci include distributed resource ownership & federation under different models with varying security policies; secure containment with controlled Internet access, and dynamic configuration. 2) Identification, refinement and documentation of the research agenda and methodologies enabled by the NMC, working with research and industry communities who stand to benefit from and participate in the Collaboratory. 3) Structural planning and preliminary outreach to establish the Collaboratory, with early founding members from government, industry, and academia.