SuperBots! vs. Evil BotNets

The news wires are abuzz with stories of hackers attacking U.S. military sites, CNN, and anti-China sites. The tech wires are filled with warnings against opening unsolicited emails, and protecting against spam. All of this has a common theme, and that theme is botnets.

A Botnet is a collection of software robots, or bots, which run autonomously and automatically on groups of zombie computers controlled remotely.

Botnets are used to bring down websites using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack – are a collection of computers, spread across the internet, which have been zombied by someone so that they can be used automatically.

Websites have a hard time standing up to these attacks, as the sheer amount of computer attacking them is overwhelming.

So that is why a team from the University of Washington want to bring together their own botnet; a botnet for good, not for evil! They believe that their plan would not only be cheap to implement, but would be able to cope with attacks from botnets of any size.

Known as Phalanx, the Washington team believes their system could render all forms of DDoS attacks obsolete. Instead of the server Phalanx is protecting access information directly, all incoming information would have to pass through the swam of “mailbox” computers.

These mailboxes don’t simply work as a relay for information to pass through, but they only allow information to be accessed when it is requested. "Hosts use these mailboxes in a random order," the researchers explain. "Even an attacker with a multimillion-node botnet can cause only a fraction of a given flow to be lost," the researchers say.

"Rather than using an ill-gotten botnet, Phalanx would use the large networks of computers which companies currently use to serve massive amounts of content," says team member Colin Dixon.

The Washington team performed a highly successful test run of their system. Simulating an attack from a million-computer botnet, on a server connected to a network of 7,200 mailboxes, saw the server functioning normally, even though the majority of the mailboxes were under simultaneous attack.

"These existing networks are so large and well-provisioned that they are currently the best option to withstand denial of service attacks from botnets," he told New Scientist. "Longer term, I think it's quite possible to fold home machines into the system as well."

Posted by Josh Hill.

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