20 kick-ass network research projects

Website morphing, sleep talking PCs, undetectable phishing attacks and unfreezing software among IT researchers' coolest projects

While start-up funding and the emergence of exciting new network startups has fizzled over the past year, research projects at university and other labs continue to sizzle. Here's look at 20 of the coolest:

Plotting a cheap, distributed zero-day worm defense 

Shutting down zero-day computer attacks could be carried out inexpensively by peer-to-peer software that shares information about anomalous behavior, say researchers at the University of California at Davis. The software would interact with existing personal firewalls and intrusion detection systems to gather data about anomalous behavior, says Senthil Cheetancheri, the lead researcher on the project he undertook as a grad student at UC Davis from 2004 to 2007. The software would share this data with randomly selected peer machines to determine how prevalent the suspicious activity was, he says. If many machines experience the identical traffic, that increases the likelihood that it represents a new attack for which the machines have no signature. The specific goal would be to detect self-propagating worms that conventional security products have not seen before.

Page 2 of 6

Follow Bob Brown on Twitter and at our Alpha Doggs blog for more on network research news

Making quantum computers a reality 

Researchers in the U.K. and the U.S. published a paper detailing discoveries that might bring a fully functional quantum computer one step closer to reality. Quantum computing, which has been researched for decades, has traditionally had a problem of keeping data in a coherent format, making it difficult to run programs or computing tasks. The researchers have found a way to preserve electrons, which store the data, longer, which allows a system to process data more coherently and run programs more effectively. The group's research focused on phosphorus atoms in silicon. The best attempts previously have flowed a current past the electrons via small electrical wires, but that has brought in a lot of quantum noise, removing a key advantage of the material.

Separately, researchers from Toshiba and Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory are reporting a breakthrough they say could make quantum cryptography a reality in the near-term. The gist of the research is that they've come up with a much less complicated way (a "decoy protocol" generated using a laser and a compact detector) to support quantum cryptography, one that does not rely on cryogenic cooling or complicated optical configurations.

Microsoft and University of California, San Diego researchers have developed a device they say can save on energy costs by enabling end users to put their computers into a "sleep talking" mode that falls somewhere in between awake and sleep modes. They say it could save 60% to 80% on energy usage. The USB device, dubbed Somniloquy, features a low-power processor that works at the PC's network interface level on wired and wireless networks. It boasts an embedded operating system and flash memory, and disguises itself as a sleeping PC to other systems on a network. But it can also wake up the actual PC in times of need, such as if a large file is coming in.

Separately, University of Liverpool researchers have developed software called PowerDown that they say could save big organizations close to $17K per month simply by automating the shutoff of computer systems not being used. 

Giving the boot to rebooting PCs 

NSF-funded researchers are applying ultra-thin ferroelectric materials found on ATM and other smart cards to computers, with hopes that one day this could result in low-power/high-speed memory devices and computers that turn on faster. The researchers, from Cornell University, Penn State University and Northwestern University, reported their findings in the journal Science on April 17 in an article titled "A Ferroelectric Oxide Made Directly on Silicon." The researchers have put strontium titanate on silicon in such a way that the material has been "squeezed into a ferroelectric state," according to the NSF. More research needs to be done to develop faster booting computers, but the researchers are encouraged by initial results.