From the London News:
IT engineers have developed a new method of self-destruction to secure computer networks against hacking. The approach works by giving all the devices on a network or “nodes” – the ability to destroy themselves, taking any nearby malevolent device with them.
Self-sacrifice provides a check against malicious nodes attacking legitimate ones.
“Our suicide mechanism is similar in that it enables simple devices to protect a network by removing malicious devices – but at the cost of its own participation,” said Tyler Moore, a security engineer at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
The technique, called “suicide revocation,” lets a single node decide quickly whether another node’s behaviour is malevolent and shut it down. But there’s a drastic cost involved in this procedure: the single node must deactivate itself too. It simply broadcasts an encrypted message declaring itself and the malevolent node dead.
I can’t even begin to fathom the rationale that was put in place here. OK, so the systems off themselves to avoid being hacked. Well, then this would make for one hell of a denial of service scenario.
“Suicide attacks are found widely in nature, from bees to helper T-cells in the immune system,” says Ross Anderson, a colleague of Moore’s.
Yeah, but in those cases the adversary didn’t see it as a leverage opportunity.
[tags]Suicidal Computers, Computer Defense, Denial of Service[/tags]
