By Kemal Akman, Joe Stewart, Jaan Tallinn, Paul Werbos, and other members of the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board. Print report!
 
1.0 OVERVIEW
 
As the Internet grows in importance, an attack on it could cause physical as well as informational damage. An attack today on hospital systems or electric utilities could lead to deaths. In the future an attack could be used to alter the output that is produced by nanofactories worldwide leading to massive deaths. This program looks for solutions to prevent such attacks, or at least reduce the damage caused by them.
 
 
2.0 TYPES OF ATTACKS
 
2.1 A DISTRIBUTED ATTACK
 
A distributed attack (in practice, that means commandeering and deploying botnets of zombies). This is the most serious threat that we are currently aware of and it needs to be addressed.
 
Besides mitigating weakest links for zombie use by making common operating systems more secure, the strategy is early detection and blocking at ISP or tier level, by having key routers worldwide communicate about suspicious events. Because of today's financial significance, there is already significant research and practical cooperation (much of it non-public).
 
Important papers on this topic are Inferring Internet denial-of-service activity by David Moore, Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage, and Implementing Pushback: Router-Based Defense Against DDoS Attacks by John Ioannidis and Steven M. Bellovin.
 
2.2 PHISHING ATTACKS
 
Phishing attacks are a very real and growing problem that causes billions in damage each year. These attacks and worm/virus threats can be recognized and somewhat mitigated or blocked early by global cooperation that makes heuristic comparison and detection of suspicious activity possible.
 
2.3 ATTACK AGAINST PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
 
Attack against the physical infrastructure of the net. Because of its distributed nature, the Internet is rather immune to physical attacks and therefore this type of attack is not a focus of the InternetShield.
 
Note that the idea of secureDNS could make the Internet less secure *if* it was controlled by just one government. The key infrastructure of the net must be spread out over many countries, and long-term should be spread further out than its main base of North America and Europe (where most of the root servers are).
 
2.4 SPECIALIZED ONE-ON-ONE ATTACK
 
A "specialized one-on-one" attack against a specific node. For example, a cracker infiltrating the intranet of a company or government institution. Addressing such specialized attacks with a generic security system is rather ineffective, because specialized attacks usually can afford tailored and/or "offline" vectors such as social engineering. This would be a difficult attack for the InternetShield to handle.
 
2.5 ONE-TO-MANY ATTACK
 
A "one-to-many" attack is an attack with many targets but with a small number of fixed sources that can be localized.
 
This problem will become increasingly significant as software becomes more intelligent and the strategies to exploit targets becomes more efficient and faster. Better detection of these attacks, and strategies against worms fooling users by social engineering more sophisticated than "i love you" emails are needed.
 
The better the strategy of a piece of exploit software, the faster and more reliably it can exploit other hosts — or their users — before that "attacker" host is shut down. The one-to-many efficiency directly dictates the virulence of an Internet worm, for example. Imagine an artificial intelligence developed a few years from now which specialized in one-to-many attacks, and which was self-improving within specialized limits, and you have imagined a big problem.
 
2.6 ATTACK AGAINST SOFTWARE COMPONENTS OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE
 
Attack against the software components of the infrastructure, such as router firmware or DNS implementations. If, in current context, we consider routers, DNS servers, etc., as network nodes, we don't really need a special case for them.
 
Note that common Internet software and Operating Systems should implement user-friendly ways of switching to the existing alternative DNS roots.
 
 
3.0 SOCIAL SOLUTIONS
 
The most important part of the InternetShield is its organizing of all the interested parties controlling various facets of the Internet architecture coming together to share information and provide quick response to reports of malicious activity emanating from their networks. The reason we're in such a bad state today is that there are too many countries/networks who simply don't take any action when malicious activity is reported to them. Worse still, some are actively complicit in the activity, but operate with a stance of plausible deniability and a surface appearance of cooperation, all the while sharing reports with the bad guys.
 
South Korea has the right approach to enforcing shutdowns of malicious activity on networks they control — if the South Korean CERT tells an ISP to kill an IP address/hostname or a registrar in the country to kill a hostname, with proof of malicious activity, the ISP/registrar must comply by law. Compare that to CERT bodies in other countries, which are powerless by comparison, and only act as information conduits.
 
We believe that each country in the world that has a connection to the Internet should sign a treaty that mandates they will:

1. Create a CERT body to deal with reports of malicious activity. This body should be mostly composed of independent professional representatives, especially of the major ISPs, to assure neutrality, competence and efficiency in dealing with these issues.
    
   Reporting of incidents to the responsible CERT should become legally binding. A less bureaucratic solution would be that IT-related insurance companies demand reporting of all incidents in their contracts to mitigate the overall impact and frequency of cyberattacks. (And CERT would require that you have IT insurance.)
    
   
2. Create a separate law-enforcement branch that will follow up on repeated criminal Internet activity by actors within their physical borders (regardless of provable monetary losses).
    
   This branch will need to differentiate between individual financial losses (traditional fraud against companies, persons, copyright) and the more serious: attacking the Internet infrastructure (DDoS, mass phishing, mass intrusions, worms, viruses, attacks against ISPs and real-world infrastructure such as CCTV, hospitals, and power grids).
    
   
3. Require cooperation and information sharing between these bodies inside the country and also with other countries' CERT/LE bodies.
    
   
4. Give these bodies the authority and power to require ISPs/registrars within their borders to remove malicious sites and hostnames upon a report by the CERT or face monetary penalties for not doing so.