Briefs

Government Computer News (03/04/04); Jackson, Joab

A researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., has applied techniques from the field of thermodynamics to characterize data traffic on computer networks, and says the concepts about visualizing network activity should make it easier to fend off security attacks. David Ford, a senior research coordinator for the Defense Information Systems Agency, posted a paper, Application of Thermodynamics to the Reduction of Data Generated by a Non-Standard System, in Cornell University's electronic repository for scientific papers in February. The paper is a formal explanation of prototype software that visualizes the state of a network, which Ford helped build. The Therminator software is able to make sense of the normal activity of a computer network, and identify any unusual activity. Thermodynamics has been used by mathematics to make sense of complex environments, and Ford believes it can be used to comprehend the movements of packets of data, which behave similarly to molecules. "When a packet does something that is not within the intended flow, then it stands out like a sore thumb," says Ford. Intrusion detection systems are often designed to bombard security administrators with information.

Here is the rest of the story.