Featured Affiliates
 
  Dongyan Xu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, conducts research in the areas of protection, management, and quality of service of next generation distributed systems. He leads the Lab For Research In Emerging Network and Distributed Services (FRIENDS).
 
  Xuxian Jiang‘s interests include system and network security. His research at Purdue involves Collapsar, a VM-based architecture for network attack detention center.
 
  Helen Wang is a researcher in the Systems & Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research.
 
  Eugene Spafford is CERIAS’ Executive Director and Professor of Computer Sciences and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue.   

Internet worms are becoming increasingly sophisticated and stealthy. In response, CERIAS researchers have partnered with Microsoft to create a worm playground: a safe, convenient environment where Internet worms can be unleashed and observed.

Purdue professor Dongyan Xu teamed with Microsoft researcher Helen J. Wang and Purdue Ph. D. student Xuxian Jiang to create Virtual Playgrounds For Worm Behavior Investigation, with input from CERIAS Executive Director Eugene Spafford .

A vGround is an all-software virtual environment created specifically for worm attack. It sits on top of a physical infrastructure but cannot access the Internet. Therefore, unleashing the worms is safe. The vGround allows for observation of worms for infection, damage, and propagation. Unleashing the worms would be safe since the Internet would not be accessible from vGrounds.

Xu, Wang, and Jiang will present their research at the 8th annual RAID symposium in Seattle (September 7-9, 2005). The symposium brings together leading researchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to discuss intrusion detection technologies from both research and commercial application perspectives. Full paper submission has been closed, but RAID-2005 is accepting Poster Session submissions until August 15th. Additional information and a preliminary program are available at http://www.conjungi.com/RAID. Registration has started.