Mid-scale RI-1 (M1:DP): Designing a global measurement infrastructure to improve Internet security

While the Internet has become critical infrastructure permeating all aspects of modern society, its security and trustworthy character are subject to constant threats and attacks. Any enterprise or service can have its traffic deflected to a masquerading site that attempts to mimic the legitimate site, steal user credentials, disrupt security, or defraud users.

The security of the Internet infrastructure is a high priority for the security research community, but that community is greatly hindered by a lack of relevant data. The goal of this project is a validated design for a transformative infrastructure to support collection, curation, archiving, and expanded sharing of data needed to advance critical and stunted scientific research on the security, stability, and resilience of Internet infrastructure.

The measurement infrastructure design effort will focus on the Internet transport layer: routing, domain naming, addressing, and key management (the Certificate Authorities). Community workshops and interactive prototyping efforts will enable evaluation of a proposed design of a measurement infrastructure to acquire and share such security-relevant data at a macroscopic scale.

Due to the complexity, volume, and sensitivity of resulting data, the design will cover many facets of data management: curation, post-processing analytics, privacy preserving data analysis frameworks, data discovery and accessibility, and normalized data sharing agreements. To support use of and feedback on prototypes, the PIs will develop an on-line course on Network Infrastructure Data Science, that will facilitate responsible (ethical, privacy-respecting) use of the datasets and analytics, and STEM/cybersecurity workforce training.

This design project will enable the application of data-intensive methods to data from the global Internet infrastructure, overcoming a key barrier to scientific and engineering advances to navigate current and future Internet-related harms. The project will contribute to a broad range of disciplines that now depend on data about the Internet, including network science, socioeconomic studies, international relations, and political science.

The resulting capabilities to support data acquisition, curation, and sharing will have an inherent equalizing effect on the research community. Moreover, if successful, this cyberinfrastructure will increase the trustworthiness of the Internet for U.S. citizens, and serve as a model for rest of the world.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.