ITR/SI: Guarding the Next Internet Frontier: Countering Denial of Information

随着互联网带来的应用变得信息丰富，确保在存在潜在恶意实体的情况下访问高质量的信息将是一个重大挑战。该研究项目的目标是开发防御技术来对抗拒绝信息(DOI)攻击。此类攻击试图通过故意引入看似有用的信息的噪音来混淆信息系统。如果用户必须在对手制造的噪音中找到隐藏关键信息的大海捞针，那么仅有信息的可用性是不够的。研究的重点是描述在DOI攻击存在的情况下相关的信息质量度量。特别是，探索了两个互补的指标。信息规律性捕获了信息创建和获取模式的可预测性。第二个度量是信息质量信任，它反映了信息源满足其客户需求的已知能力。这项研究的一个主要目标是开发技术来为信息源得出这些指标的值。其他计划的研究活动包括建立分布式信息基础设施和对防御DOI攻击的技术进行实验评估。

As applications enabled by the Internet become information rich, ensuring access to quality information in the presence of potentially malicious entities will be a major challenge. The goal of this research project is to develop defensive techniques to counter denial-of-information (DoI) attacks. Such attacks attempt to confuse an information system by deliberately introducing noise that appears to be useful information. The mere availability of information is insufficient if the user must find a needle in a haystack of noise that is created by an adversary to hide critical information. The research focuses on the characterization of information quality metrics that are relevant in the presence of DoI attacks. In particular, two complementary metrics are explored. Information regularity captures predictability in the patterns of information creation and access. The second metric, information quality trust, captures the known ability of an information source to meet the needs of its clients. The development of techniques to derive the values of these metrics for information sources is a key goal of the research. Other planned research activities include the building of a distributed information infrastructure and experimental evaluation of defensive techniques against DoI attacks.