An architecture for adaptive intrusion-tolerant applications

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 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 we 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 the use of the ITUA architecture to support them in an architectural framework. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.