This talk discusses two roles that adaptation can play in network
defense systems. Firstly, adaptation to impairments is a hallmark of
well-behaved network traffic. We propose that the response of a traffic
flow to stress testing it with artificial impairments can help
distinguish good from bad traffic. The second role for adaptation is to
tune the sensitivity of network defense systems. We propose a generic
tuning method that can control a variety of defense systems through
dynamically minimizing the total cost of misidentification of attacking
traffic. This is joint work with Weibo Gong, Balachander Krishnamurthy,
Don Towsley and Cliff Zou.
Nick Duffield holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences (Physics and Theoretical Physics, 1982) and the Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics (1983) from the University of Cambridge, U.K. He was awarded a Ph.D. (1987) by London University, U.K., for a study of dynamics and stability of non-equilibrium phase-transitions in biological systems. He held postdoctoral positions in Heidelberg, Germany, and Dublin, Ireland, before joining the faculty of the School of Mathematical Sciences in Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland in 1991. He moved to AT&T Labs-Research in 1995, where he is Technology Leader in the Network Management and Performance Department. His current research focuses on performance measurement, inference and analysis of communications networks. He is active in the IETF and was charter Chair of its working group on Packet Sampling.