PICS: Peer Integrity Checking System

Modern computer networks are vulnerable to an ever widening variety of attacks and exploits. These attacks degrade the performance of individual hosts and of the network as a whole. They lead directly to the loss of critical data, privacy and, of course, money. A key characteristic of these attacks is the installation of unwanted programs (malware) into the host nodes comprising the network. Architecture Technology will leverage its extensive experience in conducting and transitioning leading-edge research into commercial products in the networking and security fields to create PICS, the Peer Integrity Checking System. PICS uses Peer-to-Peer technology as a means of network self-defense: the network itself will sense and react to intrusive attacks in a distributed, fault-tolerant manner. The goal of this work is to strengthen file integrity checking by ensuring that many more than just one host must be compromised before an attack on any one host goes undetected. Co-operative processes automatically detect suspicious or obviously compromised nodes without human intervention, alerting other nodes, users, and network owners/operators to their presence. PICS is commercially applicable to virtually all network-connected computers as a means of co-operative network defense against intrusive malware.