Fault Tolerance for Fight Through (FTFT)
Abstract
When our cyber defenses' ability to prevent, avoid, and detect an attack are outmaneuvered and our information systems face impending loss of critical services, a fight-through capability must remain; otherwise restoration of those services may come too late for us to emerge undefeated. The task of "protecting the protector" drives us to create a fight-through capability that is hardened and heavily defended in cyberspace; however, these attributes alone are a "Maginot Line" that begs the question of why cyber attacks succeed in the first place. The more realistic goal is to design a fight-through capability that can absorb punishment and then rebound so that it can be the basis for restoration of critical services. Adaptations of fault-tolerant computing concepts have been applied to address needs in cyber defense. We likened the fight-through problem to an Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop. Redundancy, as the underpinning of fault tolerance, was strategically placed to counter an attacker's optimal strategies. The fight-through OODA loop was aimed to outperform the adversary's OODA loop.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 2013
- Accession Number
- ADA579665
Entities
People
- Kevin Kwiat
Organizations
- Air Force Research Laboratory