terriko

You may have seen this article on Peter G. Neumann: Killing the Computer to Save It. It was making the rounds a few weeks ago. (Note that you can read NYT articles without logging in if you turn on temporary cookies and then click the link.)

In case you were curious or maybe thought some of that sounded familiar, that is indeed the same DARPA grant that drew me to the US for this postdoc. I'm on CRASH or "Clean-Slate Design of Resilient Adaptive Secure Hosts." The article has a short mention of the stuff we're doing:

Clean Slate is financing research to explore how to design computer systems that are less vulnerable to computer intruders and recover more readily once security is breached.

Dr. Shrobe argues that because the industry is now in a fundamental transition from desktop to mobile systems, it is a good time to completely rethink computing. But among the biggest challenges is the monoculture of the computer “ecosystem” of desktop, servers and networks, he said.

“Nature abhors monocultures, and that’s exactly what we have in the computer world today,” said Dr. Shrobe. “Eighty percent are running the same operating system.”

Lessons From Biology

To combat uniformity in software, designers are now pursuing a variety of approaches that make computer system resources moving targets. Already some computer operating systems scramble internal addresses much the way a magician might perform the trick of hiding a pea in a shell. The Clean Slate project is taking that idea further, essentially creating software that constantly shape-shifts to elude would-be attackers.

That the Internet enables almost any computer in the world to connect directly to any other makes it possible for an attacker who identifies a single vulnerability to almost instantly compromise a vast number of systems.

But borrowing from another science, Dr. Neumann notes that biological systems have multiple immune systems — not only are there initial barriers, but a second system consisting of sentinels like T cells has the ability to detect and eliminate intruders and then remember them to provide protection in the future.

In contrast, today’s computer and network systems were largely designed with security as an afterthought, if at all.

That barely touches on all the cool stuff we're doing, since the article isn't exactly about our work at UNM & UVA, but it was pretty neat to see it in the news.

When I was an undergraduate, I found that university really wasn't living up to my expectations of stimulating, interesting people and ideas.

But today, I was totally living the academic dream.

We had a visit from a leading expert on ant behaviour. This wasn't about computer ant algorithms; she studies real live ants. We started off the day with her talk on the Turtle Ants she's been studying in Mexico, a talk filled with pictures of ants and paths and grad students on ladders pointing at the trees. A talk filled with speculation about behaviour and patterns and analogies to search in computer networks and bifurcation of biological trees. Over the course of the day, the group talked ants, bees, simulations on the computer and using robots, immunology, flu and t-cells in the lung, patterns and theories. It was the kind of conjunction of ideas from multiple disciplines where things were just clicking and questions and potential experiments started getting debated.

Biochemistry from my scientist parents, ecology and field work from Macoun Club, immunology from the above plus my own master's research, algorithms from math and CS... I was pretty proud of myself for knowing the jargon pretty much across the board and being able to keep up. I love that I'm with a group where seemingly disjoint backgrounds are consistently recognized as a huge advantage, and my own particular background fits right in.

I learned a bunch about ants and flu today. My notebook is filled with doodles of ants and cells doing stuff. Apparently turtle ants, since they have paths in the trees, sometimes get the paths broken when the wind blows, and the ants just back up and wait for the wind to blow the branches back so they can keep going. I learned that swine flu's replication rates in cells are a hundred times higher than avian flu (and ~20 times more than regular flu) but avian flu does other things to suppress immune response. I learned some about how T-cells get into the lungs and find infection despite the fact that they don't seem to move fast enough to explain how well we handle infection. And I got to watch people putting ideas together in ways that might result in using experiments in ants to try to explain things that would be much harder to test in the lungs, and so many ideas that probably just couldn't happen anywhere else.

So if you've been wondering why the heck I moved here despite the many downsides about the US/desert/altitude/regional poverty/city, etc.... this is why: Cutting edge research at the conjunction of biology, computing, and maybe a few fields besides. Even if I decide to do something else once my contract is played out, this has already been amazingly worthwhile, and with my own project starting to take shape, I'm pretty sure it's just going to get better!

I spent lunchtime arguing about philosophy, and after talking about whether acknowledging not being able to build a full model of something was important when working with smaller scale models... and now I'm feeling slightly ambivalent about solving my current bug in the face of the general undecidability of code.

The ironic part of this is that I spent the tail end of the conversation wishing I could just go back to writing code.