Microsoft research targets security, searching

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. showed off forward-looking technologies during a research road show yesterday, including new ways aimed at protecting users from worms and identifying Web spam.
Other technologies that representatives from Microsoft's research group displayed at the company's Mountain View, Calif., campus included a tool to add metadata to digital pictures to make them easier to find, technology to improve the use of large displays with Windows and a system that can create summaries of news stories by scanning several articles on the same subject.
Microsoft researcher Helen Wang detailed a proposed "shield technology" for protecting computers between the time a software vulnerability is disclosed and the time a patch is made available and applied. Microsoft's top executives have mentioned the technology in speeches, but they have provided little detail.
Regular software updates have been unable to prevent Internet worm attacks such as last year's Slammer and Blaster. Both exploited known vulnerabilities in Microsoft software: Slammer in Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Blaster in Windows XP and Windows 2000.
A shield is basically an application-specific firewall that is updated with vulnerability-specific data, Wang said. It would protect computers against worm attacks by examining network traffic and taking action if malicious traffic is detected. Vulnerability signatures would be distributed much like antivirus signatures are today.
Users have been slow to patch their systems because updates need to be tested. "The shield is not disruptive and is much easier to test for side effects and easily reversible," Wang said. "These features allow a shield to be automatically installed, unlike software patches."
While Wang said Microsoft's product groups have shown a lot of interest in the shield technology, there are no concrete product plans. Microsoft is currently working on Longhorn, the next version of its Windows client, as well as releases of SQL Server and Windows Server 2003. All could potentially benefit from shield technology.
Fighting spam is another priority. While most of the emphasis has been on spam in e-mail, Microsoft's researchers showed an application of statistical analysis to identify what Microsoft calls Web spam.
"A spam Web page is a page that exists only to misdirect traffic from a search engine," said Dennis Fetterly, a Microsoft technologist involved with the project. Many of the spam Web pages try to sell users porn, software or financial services, and aim for high rankings in search engines, he said.
Web spam can be identified by looking at the tactics used by the owners of such Web sites to trick search engines. Microsoft is tracking how many domain names point to the same Web site,the length of domain names and the number of links to the same site on a Web page, among other things, Fetterly said.
By analyzing the data, likely spam pages can be pinpointed. These could then be excluded from a search engine or placed lower on a search results page, Fetterly said.
The Web spam page could be of use to Microsoft's MSN team, which is working to launch a new Web search service later this year to compete with Google. Fetterly wouldn't confirm if MSN plans to use the technology.
Microsoft Research was founded in 1991 and has a staff of over 700 people in five locations around the world. The group gets a small piece of Microsoft's multibillion-dollar research and development budget to invent new technologies that might eventually make it into Microsoft products.