Improving Complex Distributed Software System Availability Through Information Hiding

Abstract

For distributed software systems, ensuring their availability under intentional attacks is critical. Traffic analysis, conducted by the attacker, could reveal the protocol being carried out by the components. Furthermore, having inferred the protocol, the attacker can use the pattern of the messages as a guide to the most critical components. We thwart these directed attacks by using message forwarding to reduce traffic differences, thus diverge attackers from targeted attack to random attack, which probabilistically prolongs the availability of important components in the system. The simulation results also show that message forwarding effectively balance the traffic flow and hence indicate the validity of our approach.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 26, 2010
Accession Number
ADA527712

Entities

People

  • Kevin Kwiat
  • Li Wang
  • Shangping Ren
  • Xiaowei Li
  • Yair Leiferman

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Algorithms
  • Availability
  • Camouflage
  • Communications Protocols
  • Computer Science
  • Environment
  • False Targets
  • Frequency
  • Frequency Agility
  • Information Operations
  • Intrusion Detection
  • Models
  • Network Topology
  • Redundancy
  • Simulations
  • Targets

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Regression Analysis.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML