Abstract

As the Internet has become pervasive and our critical infrastructures have become inextricably tied to information systems, the risk for economic, social, and physical disruption due to the insecurities of information systems has increased immeasurably. Over the past 10 years there has been increased investment in research on cyber security technologies by US government agencies (including NSF, DARPA, the armed forces) and industry. However, a large-scale deployment of security technology sufficient to protect the vital infrastructure is lacking. One important reason for this deficiency is the lack of an experimental infrastructure and rigorous scientific methodologies for developing and testing next-generation cyber security technology. To date, new security technologies have been tested and validated only in small-to medium-scale private research facilities, which are not representative of large operational networks or of the portion of the Internet that could be involved in an attack.
To make rapid advances in defending against attacks, the state of the art in evaluation of network security mechanisms must be improved. This will require the development of large-scale security testbeds [3] combined with new frameworks and standards for testing and benchmarking that make these testbeds truly useful. Current deficiencies and impediments to evaluating network security mechanisms include lack of scientific rigor [6]; lack of relevant and representative network data [5]; inadequate models of defense mechanisms; and inadequate models of the network and both the background and attack traffic data [1]. The latter is challenging because of the …

Date

March 6, 2026

Authors

R Bajcsy, T Benzel, M Bishop, B Braden, C Brodley, S Fahmy, S Floyd, W Hardaker, A Joseph, G Kesidis, K Levitt, B Lindell, P Liu, D Miller, R Mundy, C Neuman, R Ostrenga, V Paxson, P Porras, C Rosenberg, JD Tygar, S Sastry, D Sterne, SF Wu