A Multi-faceted Approach to Countering Internet Threats

While the Internet has revolutionalized the communication landscape, it continues to be plagued by issues of robustness and security that threaten the network’s operation. In this dissertation, we employ a multi-faceted approach to tackle these issues. Specifically, measurement studies are performed to experimentally quantify the ground truth related to the robustness of the Internet infrastructure and security threats in the wild. This work is complemented by research on future Internet threats and mechanisms to contain them. The source of these threats are novel classes of malware which exploit the increasing attack surface, presented by rapidly evolving Internet technologies. As an instance of quantifying the emerging security threats in the wild, we performed a wide-scale measurement study of the Storm botnet. This botnet, which represents the leading edge in botnet technology, uses a distributed peer-to-peer(P2P) architecture and aggressively defends itself. We developed a crawler which actively scourged the P2P botnet, to determine its size and other structural properties. This study shows how traditional P2P distributed hash tables (DHTs) differ from botnet DHTs, eventhough they use the same underlying P2P protocol mainly due to the diverse interests of participating entities within. ii