An architecture for adaptive intrusion-tolerant applications
Citation: Partha Pal, Paul Rubel, Michael Atighetchi, Franklin Webber, William H. Sanders, Mouna Seri, HariGovind Ramasamy, James Lyons, Tod Courtney, Adnan Agbaria, Michel Cukier, Jeanna Gossett, Idit Keidar, An architecture for adaptive intrusion-tolerant applications, Software: Practice and Experience, Volume 36, Issue 11-12 (September - October 2006) (p 1331-1354)
Formats: SP&E web site draft-PDF
Abstract Applications that are part of a mission-critical information system need to maintain a usable level of key services through ongoing cyber-attacks. In addition to the well-publicized denial of service (DoS) attacks, these networked and distributed applications are increasingly threatened by sophisticated attacks that attempt to corrupt system components and violate service integrity. While various approaches have been explored to deal with the DoS attacks, corruption-inducing attacks remain largely unaddressed. We have developed a collection of mechanisms based on redundancy, Byzantine fault tolerance, and adaptive middleware that help distributed, object-based applications tolerate corruption-inducing attacks. In this paper, we present the ITUA architecture which integrates these mechanisms in a framework for auto-adaptive intrusion-tolerant systems, and describe our experience in using the technology to defend a critical application that is part of a larger avionics system as an example. We also motivate the adaptive responses that are key to intrusion tolerance, and explain using the ITUA architecture how to support them in an architectural framework.
