Final Report : Architectures for Secure and Robust Distributed Infrastructures *

The major barrier constraining the successful management and design of large-scale distributed infrastructures is the conspicuous lack of knowledge about their dynamical features and behaviors. Up until very recently analysis of systems such as the Internet, or the national electricity distribution system, have primarily relied on the use of non-dynamical models, which neglect their complex, and frequently subtle, inherent dynamical properties. These traditional approaches have enjoyed considerable success while systems are run in predominantly cooperative environments, and provided that their performance boundaries are not approached. With the current proliferation of applications using and relying on such infrastructures, these infrastructures are becoming increasingly stressed, and as a result the incentives for malicious attacks are heightening. The stunning fact is that the fundamental assumptions under which all significant large-scale distributed infrastructures have been constructed and analyzed no longer hold; the invalidity of these non-dynamical assumptions is witnessed with the greater frequency of catastrophic failures in major infrastructures such as the Internet, the power grid, the air traffic system, and national-scale telecommunication systems. This project is about network, reliability and robustness in large-scale systems. The major vision of this program is ubiquitous: we have distributed computing and information and would like to link these via secure communications to allow coordination of limited resources to achieve *This research was supported by AFOSR DoD award number 49620-01-1-0365