Howard Shrobe |
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Title: Building Survivable
Information Systems |
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Abstract: Cyber-attack poses a major challenge to the large scale computational infrastructures of modern society. Traditional approaches to the protection of such systems, emphasizes the static construction of "provably secure" systems and the erection of "perimeter defenses" such as fire-walls. Although these are useful techniques, we believe they are at most a part of the story. No system in the real world will be provably secure (although many of the most glaring vulnerabilities would be removed if we programmed in languages like LISP that emphasize structured use of memory) and perimeter defenses are always subject to subversion from the inside. Instead we must rely on systems that take responsibility for their own survival. Autonomous Survivable Systems must: 1)
Build models of the trustability of the
computational resources 2)
Allocate resources and decide on methods for
achieving goals based on these models 3)
Monitor their own execution in order to detect
symptoms of compromised resources 4)
Update the trust model based on self-monitoring as
well as other information (such as intrusion detectors). These Autonomous Survivable Systems are highly dynamic and
most easily built in Lisp-like environments. I will describe work done on early prototyping of such
systems. |
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