Friday, May 10, 2002

Cadets Defend Electronic Networks in 4-Day Network-Defense Exercises By MICHAEL ARNONE Students at the U.S. military academies and the Naval Postgraduate School are learning first-hand the value and challenge of protecting computer networks. Last month, the students sparred with computer-security experts from the U.S. military and government in the second annual Cyber-Defense Exercise, jointly sponsored by the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency. For four days, 30 cadets and graduate students defended networks they had built against attacks by experts from the security agency, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Army. Experts from Carnegie Mellon University acted as referees and also played the third-party users of the systems who had experienced the effects of the attacks. Students from the Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., and the U.S. Naval Academy operated networks that sustained slight damage, said Wayne J. Schepens, an information-systems-security engineer at the National Security Agency. He is an NSA Visiting Fellow at West Point, and he supervised the information-security exercise, which he and faculty members at the other academies helped design. Cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy fared worse but still did a good job overall, he said. The students set up computer networks and had to guard the information in them and the services they hosted, such as e-mail and Web sites, said J.D. Fulp, a lecturer in computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School who was the program manager for the institution's participation in the exercise. The students had to detect intrusions, recover lost information and capabilities, and prevent future attacks. Each team in the competition won points for successfully repelling attacks and lost points for permitting intrusions to its network. For the second year, the Naval Postgraduate School earned the most points but West Point was declared the official winner. The postgraduate school was ineligible to win because its students have more experience than the undergraduate cadets, Mr. Fulp said. The Naval Postgraduate School, the Air Force Academy, and West Point participated in last year's competition, Mr. Fulp said. Cadets from the Coast Guard Academy and the Naval Academy joined the exercise this year. Representatives from the United States Merchant Marine Academy observed the exercise this year, and the academy is considering joining in the future. The exercise was the final project for courses the cadets took this semester, Mr. Schepens said. As a special project, Cadet Allen J. Peplinski, a fourth-year student at West Point who is a computer-science major, designed the networks that all the teams built. The students from the Naval Postgraduate School participated in the exercise on top of their regular course work, Mr. Fulp said. The Public Key Infrastructure Program Management Office at the Department of Defense supplied each institution with about $125,000 to buy off-the-rack hardware and software to create identical networks, said Mr. Schepens. The students then customized and hardened the systems, changing user-access settings to the most restrictive levels and installing software patches to make the networks less vulnerable to attack. Protecting computer networks is a new front in the future of military conflict, said John Arquilla, an associate professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School who is a consultant to the RAND Corporation. He is a co-author of Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, a book on cyberterrorism. Academic experts in information technology and related fields are probably more aware of the threat of Internet-based attacks than is the military, Mr. Arquilla said. Academic studies and exercises, such as the Cyber-Defense Exercise, can highlight issues from which the military could learn, he said. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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