Professor Chin-Tser Huang, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, recently received an NSF grant for his project titled Dynamic Early Filtering of Botnet Garbage Traffic".

Currently in the Internet there is an increasing number of unwanted, unsolicited "garbage" packets mainly generated by botnets, which can launch Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks, worm attacks, and spam. These garbage packets are allowed to traverse the Internet to cause severe traffic burdens, waste communication resources, and disrupt the Internet's normal functions. Such packets need to be discarded as close to their sources as possible to increase the availability and reliability of the Internet.

This project aims to address the above problem by establishing a comprehensive and sustainable architecture that coordinates the routers in the Internet to filter out botnet garbage packets from Internet traffic as early as possible. The architecture comprises four major components: rule generation component, rule dissemination component, rule management component, and rule security component. The objective is to investigate and quantify the tradeoff between the saved bandwidth originally consumed by the garbage traffic and the throughput slowdown introduced by the routers' extra filtering overhead, and find optimal solutions under the tradeoff function. The evaluation plan will use benchmarks developed under various traffic traces and network topologies to evaluate the performance of the developed algorithms and technologies, and derive insights on how far and wide the filtering rules should be disseminated and installed under different attack scenarios in order to optimize the performance.