James Gorsuch

Date of Award

3-2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Barry E. Mullins, PhD

Abstract

Malicious logic, specifically worms, has caused monetary expenditure problems to network users in the past. Worms, like Slammer and Code Red, have infected thousands of systems and brought the Internet to a standstill. This research examines the ability of the original Slammer worm, the Slammer based routing worm proposed by Zou et al, and a new Single Slash Eight (SSE) routing worm proposed by this research to infect vulnerable systems within a given address space. This research investigates the Slammer worm's ability to generate a uniform random IP addresses in a given address space. Finally, a comparison of the speed increase from computing systems available today versus those in use during the original Slammer release is performed. This research finds that the both the Slammer based routing worm and the SSE routing worm are faster than the original Slammer. The random number generator of the original Slammer worm does generate a statistically uniform distribution of addresses within the range under test. Further, this research shows that despite the previous research into the speed of worm propagation, there is a large void in testing worms on the systems available today that need to be investigated. The speed of the computing systems that the worms operated on in the past were more than three times slower than today's systems. As the speed of computer systems continue to grow, the speed of worm propagation should increase with it as their scan rates directly relate to their infection rate. As such, the immunity of the future IPv6 network, from scanning worms may need to be reexamined.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GCS-ENG-07-04

DTIC Accession Number

ADA469318

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