From Fault-tolerance to Attack Tolerance

Abstract

Means to build fault-tolerant services have been at hand for some time. Defense against attacks remains a difficult problem, though. The problem becomes ever more urgent with the increasing use of networked computing systems in our society's critical infrastructures and in future-generation military systems (such as GIG and JBI). The objective of this AFOSR-funded effort was to bridge the gap from fault-tolerance to attack-tolerance by exploring two threads. The first thread was to explore the use of mechanically-generated diversity for creating independent server replicas and a ``moving target'' defense. This led to a implementing a prototype system that embodied our proactive obfuscation scheme and to a theory that establishes mechanically-generated diversity is almost as powerful a defense as typechecking. The second thread was to explore language-based techniques and build a new theoretical basis for authorization and for quantifying information flow and information corruption. Here, Nexus Authorization Logic (NAL) was developed and deployed it as part of a new operating system.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 02, 2011
Accession Number
ADA548748

Entities

People

  • Fred B. Schneider

Organizations

  • Cornell University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security Techniques
  • Computers
  • Cyber Threats
  • Cybersecurity
  • Department Of Defense
  • Fault Tolerance
  • Infrastructure
  • Language
  • Moving Target Defense
  • Moving Targets
  • Operating Systems
  • Prototypes
  • Replicas
  • Security
  • Targets
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  • Systems Analysis and Design