The workshop will bring together users of cyberspace networks and researchers in networking, modeling, and simulation. Their task will be, in the first place, to identify key user requirements for network security, and secondly, to translate these requirements into definitive simulation-based design approaches for future robust and secure ultra-large networks.

This workshop will shed light on some of the key unknowns of cyberspace security. Participants will formulate new research directions that can address such unknowns using modeling and simulation technologies. The results of this workshop are expected to be a set of specific findings of gaps in our knowledge of security issues in Cyberspace and recommendations for how to employ modeling and simulation to improve our understanding in these areas. Increased understanding will foster the development of new paradigms for design of infrastructure elements for management, and control.

There are many issues that arise in the emergence of ultra-large communication networks, such as the Internet, with billions of highly decentralized interacting parts. The greatly increased connectivity and capability creates new kinds of complexities and dynamics that we are only on the verge of appreciating. The requirements of robustness and security often conflict with each other and those of performance and thus imply formidable challenges. Difficulties in dealing with large-scale software systems are well documented in a recent report by the National Research Council (Making IT Better). Techniques that work for small software systems fail when the scale is increased by hundred- to million-fold. In the context of ultra-large communication networks, current software limitations are manifest in a key finding that virtually all IP-based networks, used to control the national power grid, financial systems, and other critical infrastructure suffer from lack of robustness and are vulnerable to complete failure of communications and control under stress such as occurred during 9/11/01. Furthermore, failure to overcome current technological limitations such as inability to trace IP packets may ultimately severely impact the Constitutional right to privacy.

We will build on the findings from the first workshop in this series, ULN’01 and from a recent workshop “Guarding Your Business”, held at Steven Institute of Technology., We will focus specifically on the issues of security and robustness in ultra-large networks. Users of cyberspace will help identify critical vulnerabilities and failures of security in today’s networking technologies. Network simulation modelers will help translate these limitations into requirements for design of future networks. Participants will address the need for new techniques and approaches to build models of cyberspace networks and develop simulation environments for studying their behaviors. They will assess whether current design approaches can be evolved to deal with the large increases in scale or whether revolutionary paradigms are required. Suggestions for borrowing points of view from other areas such as complex adaptive systems and from basic theory of modeling and simulation will be encouraged.

The workshop resulted in a report providing significant guidelines to stimulate network infrastructure:

·     Second Workshop on Ultra Large Networks: New Research Directions in Modeling and Simulation-based Security