II-New: A Dual-Purpose Data Analytics Laboratory

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The research enabled by the supported infrastructure has the potential to dramatically impact society in two ways. First, by undermining entire cyber-crime ecosystems: disrupting underground activities, infrastructure, and social networks through strategic intervention. Inhibiting the flow of money reduces the profitability of these activities, thereby subverting the key incentive underlying modern cybercrime. Second, improved efficiency of data center networks will significantly reduce operating costs and increase energy efficiency. The infrastructure will also create educational opportunities for students at a variety of levels, expanding the research skills of postdoc, graduate, and undergraduate students to address both data center network design and security research challenges. This project is to pursue two separate multi-year research agendas. One is to collect and analyze extremely large datasets pertaining to various aspects of Internet malware and cybercrime while concurrently exploring new high-performance hybrid optical/electrical network architectures that dramatically decrease the cost and complexity of the infrastructure required to support such analytics. This award supports compute and storage resources to both conduct the analytics required for the Ecrime research, while simultaneously serving as a testbed for our prototype hybrid network switches. The research enabled by this infrastructure has two key components: 1) Through in-depth empirical analyses of a range of online criminal activities, the PIs are developing an understanding of the shape of key economic and social forces---as seen at scale---in terms of relevance for both attackers and defenders. 2) Characterizing network traffic generated by large-scale data analytics, focusing specifically on identifying the class of network traffic that a circuit switch can support as well as the partitioning of the traffic between the circuit and packet portions of the network.