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February 2005
The University has recently licensed state-of-the-art network security
technology to Englewood-based
Secure64 Software Corporation.
The new technology, based on the work of
PhD student James Garnett in conjunction with
Professor Elizabeth Bradley,
will help the company strengthen its software applications against the
effects of distributed denial of service attacks.
The University provided the following news release:
The University of Colorado has licensed network security technology to
Secure64, a software company based in Englewood, Colorado, that will use the
technology to fortify its secure 64-bit software applications against the
disastrous effects of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The
technology is a patent-pending algorithm that intelligently responds to
abnormal network activity such as DDoS attacks. It was developed in the
Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder by
Dr. James Garnett and Dr. Elizabeth Bradley.
DDoS attacks are an increasing threat to the commercial viability of the
Internet. For example, the MyDoom virus attack of January, 2004 crippled the
website operations of SCO Linux, Inc., and forced Microsoft to take emergency
action to forestall the effects. The total cost from this single event is
estimated to exceed $250 million (CNN online, January 30, 2004), and
similar attacks are now occurring on a daily basis.
The technology was developed as part of Dr. James Garnett's PhD thesis. The
method is very different from all current approaches to DDoS protection because
it responds to the effects instead of the causes, such as a flood of incoming
requests. Because of this, the technology can detect and automatically block an
attack even if it does not look like a traditional attack.
Secure64 is a 64-bit software development company establishing a new market
standard for the security and performance of network communications. It is the
first software company to take full advantage of the Itanium® chip's 64-bit
microprocessor architecture to address many of the structural and design
limitations of current general-purpose operating systems and hardware
technologies. Secure64 allows customers to dramatically increase the
performance of network processing, solve the security problems associated with
delivering mission-critical content on the network, and move greater amounts of
application processing from centralized data centers to network servers -- all
without disrupting existing network infrastructures.
While completing his thesis work at CU, Dr. Garnett worked with Secure64
developers to implement the algorithm for the Secure64 applications. The CU
technology will be available in the first commercial release of the Secure64
product, scheduled for some time this year. Commercial licenses to the CU
technology are also available for other software platforms.
Garnett earned an MS in Computer Science from the Department in 1999 and
completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2004. His dissertation was titled
Adaptive, Nonlinear, Resource-Distribution Control.
For further information on this and other technology transfers, contact the
University of Colorado
Office of Technology Transfer.
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