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[Download PDF here!]
Authors: Howard
Shrobe, Robert Laddaga, Bob Balzer, Neil Goldman, Dave Wile, Marcelo Tallis,
Tim Hollebeek, and Alexander Egyed
The
Infrastructure of modern society is controlled by software systems
that are vulnerable to attacks. Many such attacks, launched by
”recreational hackers” have already led to severe disruptions and
significant cost. It, therefore, is critical that we find ways to
protect such systems and to enable them to continue functioning even
after a successful attack. This paper describes AWDRAT, a middleware
system for providing survivability to both new and legacy
applications. AWDRAT stands for Architectural-differencing,
Wrappers, Diagnosis, Recovery, Adaptive software, and
Trust-modeling. AWDRAT uses these techniques to gain visibility into
the execution of an application system and to compare the
application’s actual behavior to that which is expected. In the case
of a deviation, AWDRAT conducts a diagnosis that figures out which
computational resources are likely to have been compromised and then
adds these assessments to its trust-model. The trust model in turn
guides the recovery process, particularly by guiding the system in
its choice among functionally equivalent methods and resources.
AWDRAT has been used on an example application system, a graphical
editor for constructing mission plans. We present data showing the
effectiveness of AWDRAT in detecting a variety of compromises to the
application system. |
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