Welcome to the Home page of the University of Delaware's Network Security Lab. The NSL is headed by Dr. Jelena Mirkovic. The NSL is part of the Department of Computer Science. It currently has four Ph.D. students, two M.S. students, and one undergraduate student. We are working on the variety of network security problems, investigating their features, and looking for effective solutions.

There are three major research foci in the NSL: Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, Internet worms, and IP spoofing. The DefCOM project works on designing distributed defenses against DDoS attacks. The DDoS benchmarks project works on designing a common evaluation methodology for DDoS defenses. The PAWS project builds a distributed, realistic and large-scale simulator of Internet events. The simulator currently replicates Internet worm spread events with high fidelity. The Clouseau project develops a protocol that helps prevent IP spoofing through route-based filtering. We are also working on a comparative evaluation of IP spoofing defenses. The Internet Credit Report project is focused on building profiles of each Internet host's communication activity and using these profiles to detect anomalous hosts. The application-level honeynet project builds a tool which detects incoming traffic going to closed ports on live machines, and detours it to the honeynet machine. We are also in the beginning stages of research on self-healing networks that can learn how to handle new threats through extensive monitoring of network events, machine learning and network behavior modeling.