I'll probably get flamed for posting this to the mailing list, but I am a
VERY happy Nessus user (it helps me keep my job) and I thought those of
you on this list might be interested in watching this webcast I am doing
today at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia on the
very subject that affects Nessus development and use...
If this was REALLY wrong to post this here, please tell me and I'll go
crawl into a hole somewhere......
-Doug Baggett
UNIX/Network Administrator
National Science Foundation
Directorate for Computers, Information Science and Engineering
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NSF is having a talk today by Dr. Paul Ammann from George Mason
University on the current state Network Vulnerability Analysis and future
problems that researchers are working on.
You can see the webcast at 4pm Today.
Here is the web Page
http://www.cise.nsf.gov/watsh/06_05_02.htm
Its the third NSF free seminar in the Washington Area Trustworthy Systems
Hour (WATSH) Series.
I higly recommend this to anybody who is remotely interested in network
security. I'll be webcasting this today and it will be available online
shortly after the talk or you can watch it live from the link provided at
the web page.
Please forward this to anybody you might think would be interested in
this, either within your company/organization or otherwise. My boss and I
are interested in exposure for these types of events for the CISE
directorate here at NSF.
Here is an abstract
Abstract
Even well administered networks are vulnerable to attack.Although
commercial scanning tools can analyze vulnerabilities on individual
hosts, they don't really help
a system administrator decide whether a vulnerable, but desirable,
service is too risky to operate.
The reason is that an attacker typically breaks into a network with a
chain of exploits, rather than a single exploit, and the system
administrator must worry about interactions between multiple exploits.
Each exploit in a chain takes advantage of the penetration achieved by
prior exploits, and the final exploit in the chain achieves the
attacker's goal. Researchers have proposed a variety of algorithms to
discover single exploit chains, to enumerate attack graphs encoding all
exploit chains, to define probability measures on attack success, to deal
with known vs. unknown exploits, to find critical sets of exploits,
hosts, and vulnerabilities, and so on. Some of these graph algorithms are
implemented directly, and others take advantage of the expressive power
and compact representations afforded by model checkers.
This talk illustrates the various current solutions along with their
limitations, and outlines some approaches to making vulnerability
analysis practical for large scale
networks.
About the speaker:
Paul Ammann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information
and Software Engineering in the School of Information Technology and
Engineering at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His basic
research interest might best be described as "Why do things go wrong
and what can we do about it?" Current research topics include secure
information systems, software testing, semantic-based transaction
processing, software for critical systems, and formal methods. He has
published fifty-some research papers in refereed journals and
conferences. He earned an AB degree in Computer Science from Dartmouth
College, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University
of Virginia. For recreation he enjoys running ultramarathons.
Contact Prof. Ammann at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Will be live on June 5, 2002, 4:00 p.m.
