Abstract: Worms are nowadays a major security threat to the Internet; and defending against worm attacks faces several tough challenges and involves a number of exciting research issues. In this talk, first, the unique propagation characteristics of various types of worms will be discussed. Second, the defenses against worms will be surveyed in four perspectives: worm prevention, worm detection, worm throttling, and worm recovery. Third, a specific worm containment scheme being developed at Penn State will be proposed. Fourth, several issues about worm research test-beds will be discussed and some worm experiments performed on the DETER test-bed will be illustrated.

Biography: Peng Liu is an assistant professor of Information Sciences and Technology, director of the Cyber Security Lab (http://ist.psu.edu/s2), and research director of the Center for Information Assurance at Penn State University . He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China , and his Ph.D. degree from George Mason University . Dr. Liu’s research interests are in the field of computer and network security, especially in attack resilient systems, database and web security, attacker behavior modeling, and worm containment. Dr. Liu is the founding program co-chair of the ACM Workshop on Survivable and Self-Regenerative Systems, the proceedings chair of the 2003 and 2004 ACM International Conference on Computer and Communications Security. He is a program committee member of several international conferences, including the 2001-2003 ACM International Conference on Computer and Communications Security and the 2004-2005 International Conference on World Wide Web. He is a referee for several international journals, including ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security, IEEE Internet Computing, and Journal of Computer Security. Dr. Liu has published a book and about 50 referred technical papers. His research is sponsored by DARPA, NSF, DHS, DOE, AFRL, Cisco, NSA, DoD, HP and Penn State . Dr. Liu is a recipient of the DOE Early CAREER PI Award.