Keynote 1: Launching academic ideas into the real world
Prof. Yehuda Afek (Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences, Tel-Aviv University)
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~afek/

Abstract: In Feb 2000, a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack took down Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, CNN and other major web sites for hours, some of us were rushed to the white-house to discuss solutions with President Bill Clinton. The estimated total damage was about 1.2 Trillion dollars. There was need for a novel distributed computing based algorithmic solution, and a fast transition of this algorithm into the real world.

In December of 2001 the Riverhead guard was launched, stopping a few DDoS attacks. In December of 2003 it brought back up a Top-5 web company that was taken down by a massive DDoS attack. Since then, the Guard algorithm has protected thousands of Internet services, some of which require 24x7 coverage since they are under continuous multi Gbps DDoS attacks. I like to think that it has made the Internet a safer place.

This talk will describe the process and my experiences in moving the guard algorithm from theory to practice.