April 2, 2009

$450,000 Supports Cyber-Backbone Survivability Work

Dr. Nasir Ghani

Dr. Majeed Hayat

ECE professors Nasir Ghani and Majeed Hayat have received three-year, $450,000 funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to study weapons of mass destruction (WMD) stressors on backbone cyber-infrastructures.

The project, titled “Paradigms for Survivability of Cyber-Infrastructure Backbone Networks Against WMD Attacks,” will characterize the effect of WMD stressors on multidomain, multilayer backbones, and will develop detailed random failure models. The team will then develop survivability schemes for multi-tiered recovery to mitigate the effects of WMD stressors.

High-speed wireline networking backbones have been harbingers of the Internet age and have become crucial for national security and economic needs. Using breakthroughs in fiber-optic and electronic technologies, these “cyber-infrastructures” span transnational and transcontinental distances and support terabit throughput speeds.

Backbone networks are generally segmented into several domains for different technology layers, yielding a hybrid of networking types. For example, optical, Internet, Ethernet, and cable. Given the large scale of backbone infrastructures, survivability against weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is important. The effects of different types of WDM attacks on backbone networks is not well understood. Most existing recovery schemes are optimized for specific layers or fine-tuned to handle single faults, so they do not provide adequate defense against WMD that can cause multiple, simultaneous failures.

For example, an explosive or electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack near a metro-area site can have a devastating effect on network connectivity and cause numerous node/link outages. These failures can percolate up network layers and cause even wider “end-to-end” disruptions. WMD attacks can also temporarily immobilize network sites and prevent access by repair personnel.

Identifying the vulnerability of multilayer backbones to WMD, and designing appropriate countermeasures, is challenge because of the decentralization of control across domains and the complexity of interactions across technology layers.

Ghani and Hayat will investigate novel topics in stochastic (random) and spatio-temporal WMD fault modeling, state aggregation, hierarchical routing, and distributed recovery schemes that are based on pre-fault and post-fault methods. The PIs are hiring doctoral students to work on the project, some of whom will work on stochastic modeling while others work on developing large-scale distributed algorithms and simulations.

In addition, Hayat and his colleagues, ECE Profs. Yasamin Mostofi and David Dietz, and Computer Science Prof. Patrick Bridges, are currently funded by DTRA on a $1.3 million project to maximize reliability in distributed systems in the presence of WDM attacks. Ghani's and Hayat’s project compliments this research by addressing the cross-layer and cross-domain dimensions of WMD attacks—a new and relatively unexplored area. The UNM team is one of the first groups nationwide to address this problem.