Computers take to suicide to protect themselves against hacking

The London News.Net
Friday 2nd November, 2007 (ANI)

London, Nov 2 : IT engineers have developed a new method of self-destruction to secure computer networks against hacking. The approach works by giving all the devices on a network or "nodes" - the ability to destroy themselves, taking any nearby malevolent device with them.

Self-sacrifice provides a check against malicious nodes attacking legitimate ones.

"Our suicide mechanism is similar in that it enables simple devices to protect a network by removing malicious devices - but at the cost of its own participation," said Tyler Moore, a security engineer at the University of Cambridge in the UK.

The technique, called "suicide revocation," lets a single node decide quickly whether another node's behaviour is malevolent and shut it down. But there's a drastic cost involved in this procedure: the single node must deactivate itself too. It simply broadcasts an encrypted message declaring itself and the malevolent node dead.

It is a fact that distributed networks have no centralised control. Instead, organisation of the network is distributed between individual devices, which can make the network both more efficient and more robust. This is not without its share of risks.

"Some devices may be compromised and made to transmit misleading data. Devices must be able to detect and respond to this misbehaviour," says Ross Anderson, a colleague of Moore's. To protect such networks from intruders, Moore, Anderson and colleagues looked to find the most efficient and reliable way to remove misbehaving devices from ad-hoc networks.

The Cambridge team, which has developed this new technique, was inspired from nature. "Suicide attacks are found widely in nature, from bees to helper T-cells in the immune system," says Ross Anderson, a colleague of Moore's.

Although the ultimate goal is different, the Cambridge team says a similar technique could protect distributed networks. "Nodes must remove themselves in addition to cheating ones to make punishment expensive," said Moore. "Otherwise, bad nodes could remove many good nodes by falsely accusing them of misbehaviour," he added.

"This approach looks to be most useful in a peer-to-peer or ad-hoc network where someone can negatively influence another party in the network," said says Jeremie Miller, the lead software architect behind a distributed search engine.

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