August 20, 2008 -- Mu Dynamics announced a joint presentation and demonstration with ABB and Digital Bond at PCSF 2008 on Aug 27. Mu Dynamics director of technical marketing will moderate the presentation “When Good Traffic Goes Bad - When Is Application Traffic Too Much?”, and will be joined by Daniel Peck, Offensive Security Researcher at Digital Bond and Kevin McGrath, Scientist at ABB. The three experts will discuss the result of their research including how too much traffic to one service undermines or degrades another service operating on the same device, and how malformed packets propagate across protocols and cause undesirable and unpredictable side effects.

The demonstration and presentation details the importance of reliability and availability — in addition to security — in preventing costly downtime and security incidents in Critical Infrastructure deployments. Millions of manufacturers, governments and Department of Defense (DoD) critical assets and infrastructure agencies are actively converting their proprietary control network systems to IP-based networks. The transition from a homogenous Critical Infrastructure or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system exposes a former proprietary network to a much larger possible attack surface.

“ABB puts a premium on its products delivering the leading reliability, availability and security baseline in our customers’ networks,” said Kevin McGrath. “To proactively build products that withstand all levels of real-world traffic, we must test both prior to shipment, and during deployment. ABB’s use of the Mu-4000 Service Analyzer throughout our software development lifecycle helps us model real world traffic, understand service response time weaknesses and adverse side-effects. It answers questions such as “if a system is being overloaded by one type of service-level traffic, what is the effect on other unexpected traffic to that system’s processes?”

WHO:
Thomas Maufer, director of technical marketing at Mu Dynamics.
Daniel Peck, Offensive Security Researcher, Digital Bond
Kevin McGrath, Scientist, ABB

WHAT:
"When Good Traffic Goes Bad: When Is Application Traffic Too Much?"

The high-level goal of this presentation is to educate the attendees at this security-focused conference to be more aware of the broader context around security--namely reliability and availability--all of which can cause service degradation or downtime, undermining safety systems or control systems that employ COTS and/or IP-based networking components. The session covers: