activities

I am Research Assistant for Dr. Richard Beigel from Spring 2004. We are working on building a new anti-virus working methodology by injecting "virus" into the systems that would vaccinate systems, instead of infecting them. For analogous thinking you might think of the similar situation of immunization in living beings.

The main idea is to build a virus that actually attacks a vulnerability of a system and then spread in its natural way except that each system it spreads to will be fixed by the virus itself so that no other viruses can attack that vulnerability. There are many issues regarding proving it to be useful. For further details you can contact me at nagesh@temple.edu or Dr. Beigel at professorb@gmail.com.

There is a huge potential for this idea. The operating system vendors need not force each of its client to update a new patch every time they release new one. The things would work out like the systems grow stronger and stronger as time passes by and new vulnerabilities are found and fixed in this way. The philosophy would sound analogous to the phenomenon observed in living beings growing stronger as time passes by.

We would appreciate any comments on this idea.

Currently I am working on demonstrating this idea on the notorious Morris Worm of November 1988.

Because of non-availability of the functional Morris worm I am now working on Slapper worm of 2002. The Slapper worm attacks a buffer-overflow vulnerability in the openssl library that is used to make an apache server secure. After breaking into a system it compiles itself on the system, finds the connected computers and spreads to them and flooding them with requests so as to cause Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS).

11/1/04

I am actively looking for open problems for my PhD thesis with Dr. Richard Beigel. I have been reading papers in Fault Diagnosis, Maximum Independent Sets and some presentations and papers related to security projects like TIMEDC, and PORTIA. I am still working towards narrowing down to solving a specific problem.

12/22/04

After being closely associated with Prof. Beigel and attending theory conference at NYU I decided to do my PhD in Theory. One of the main reasons for choosing theory as my field is that that's the way I believe I can get as close to Nature as possible. I have yet to decide on specific open problem I have to work on.

The presentations at NYU Theory-day were simply amazing. Very profound results were presented with beautiful simplicity. All the presentations there had a very nice influence on me. I was very much impressed by the presentation of Sanjeev Arora on Expander flows, Geometric Embeddings and Graph Partitioning.

Regarding my experience at the conference... I had a very nice time... I met Bill Gasarch, Scott Aaronson and had nice philosophical discussions with them.

By the way I completed the project on anti-virus model I discussed above. I built the anti-virus for Slapper worm.