Folded Interaction Systems and Their Application to the Survivability Analysis of Unbounded Systems

Modeling the fulfillment of global properties like survivability is a challenging problem in unbounded systems such as Grids, peer-to-peer systems, or swarms. This paper proposes Folded Interaction Systems (FIS), an extension of the classic I-Systems framework, to overcome the modeling issues. FIS is applied to a case of survivability assessment in Grids and demonstrates the identification of essential capabilities, the modeling of harmful incidents, and the derivation of standard strategies to sustain the survival of a system’s mission. FIS is not restricted to survivability, it can be used for investigating the preservation of any global property

Adaptive management of an active services network

The benefits of active services and networks cannot be realised unless the associated increase in system complexity can be efficiently managed. An adaptive management solution is required. Simulation results show that a distributed genetic algorithm, inspired by observations of bacterial communities, can offer many key management functions. The algorithm is fast and efficient, even when the demand for network services is rapidly varying

Recovery Model for Survivable System through Resource Reconfiguration

A survivable system is able to fulfil its mission in a timely manner, in the presence of attacks, failures, or accidents. It has been realized that it is not always possible to anticipate every type of attack or failure or accident in a system, and to predict and protect against those threats. Consequently, recovering back from any damage caused by threats becomes an important attention to be taken into account. This research proposed another recovery model to enhance system survivability. The model focuses on how to preserve the system and resume its critical service while incident occurs by reconfiguring the damaged critical service resources based on available resources without affecting the stability and functioning of the system. There are three critical requisite conditions in this recovery model: the number of pre-empted non-critical service resources, the response time of resource allocation, and the cost of reconfiguration, which are used in some scenarios to find and re-allocate the available resource for the reconfiguration. A brief specifications using Z language are also explored as a preliminary proof before the implementation .. To validate the viability of the approach, two instance cases studies of real-time system, delivery units of post office and computer system of a company, are provided in ensuring the durative running of critical service. The adoption of fault-tolerance and survivability using redundancy re-allocation in this recovery model is discussed from a new perspective. Compared to the closest work done by other researchers, it is shown that the model can solve not only single fault and can reconfigure the damage resource with minimum disruption to other services

Hybrid Cloud Model Checking Using the Interaction Layer of HARMS for Ambient Intelligent Systems

Soon, humans will be co-living and taking advantage of the help of multi-agent systems in a broader way than the present. Such systems will involve machines or devices of any variety, including robots. These kind of solutions will adapt to the special needs of each individual. However, to the concern of this research effort, systems like the ones mentioned above might encounter situations that will not be seen before execution time. It is understood that there are two possible outcomes that could materialize; either keep working without corrective measures, which could lead to an entirely different end or completely stop working. Both results should be avoided, specially in cases where the end user will depend on a high level guidance provided by the system, such as in ambient intelligence applications. This dissertation worked towards two specific goals. First, to assure that the system will always work, independently of which of the agents performs the different tasks needed to accomplish a bigger objective. Second, to provide initial steps towards autonomous survivable systems which can change their future actions in order to achieve the original final goals. Therefore, the use of the third layer of the HARMS model was proposed to insure the indistinguishability of the actors accomplishing each task and sub-task without regard of the intrinsic complexity of the activity. Additionally, a framework was proposed using model checking methodology during run-time for providing possible solutions to issues encountered in execution time, as a part of the survivability feature of the systems final goals

Recovery Model for Survivable System through Resource Reconfiguration

A survivable system is able to fulfil its mission in a timely manner, in the presence of attacks, failures, or accidents. It has been realized that it is not always possible to anticipate every type of attack or failure or accident in a system, and to predict and protect against those threats. Consequently, recovering back from any damage caused by threats becomes an important attention to be taken into account. This research proposed another recovery model to enhance system survivability. The model focuses on how to preserve the system and resume its critical service while incident occurs by reconfiguring the damaged critical service resources based on available resources without affecting the stability and functioning of the system. There are three critical requisite conditions in this recovery model: the number of pre-empted non-critical service resources, the response time of resource allocation, and the cost of reconfiguration, which are used in some scenarios to find and re-allocate the available resource for the reconfiguration. A brief specifications using Z language are also explored as a preliminary proof before the implementation .. To validate the viability of the approach, two instance cases studies of real-time system, delivery units of post office and computer system of a company, are provided in ensuring the durative running of critical service. The adoption of fault-tolerance and survivability using redundancy re-allocation in this recovery model is discussed from a new perspective. Compared to the closest work done by other researchers, it is shown that the model can solve not only single fault and can reconfigure the damage resource with minimum disruption to other services

A holistic approach for measuring the survivability of SCADA systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are responsible for controlling and monitoring Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Critical Infrastructure Systems (CIS) among others. Such systems are responsible to provide services our society relies on such as gas, electricity, and water distribution. They process our waste; manage our railways and our traffic. Nevertheless to say, they are vital for our society and any disruptions on such systems may produce from financial disasters to ultimately loss of lives. SCADA systems have evolved over the years, from standalone, proprietary solutions and closed networks into large-scale, highly distributed software systems operating over open networks such as the internet. In addition, the hardware and software utilised by SCADA systems is now, in most cases, based on COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) solutions. As they evolved they became vulnerable to malicious attacks. Over the last few years there is a push from the computer security industry on adapting their security tools and techniques to address the security issues of SCADA systems. Such move is welcome however is not sufficient, otherwise successful malicious attacks on computer systems would be non-existent. We strongly believe that rather than trying to stop and detect every attack on SCADA systems it is imperative to focus on providing critical services in the presence of malicious attacks. Such motivation is similar with the concepts of survivability, a discipline integrates areas of computer science such as performance, security, fault-tolerance and reliability. In this thesis we present a new concept of survivability; Holistic survivability is an analysis framework suitable for a new era of data-driven networked systems. It extends the current view of survivability by incorporating service interdependencies as a key property and aspects of machine learning. The framework uses the formalism of probabilistic graphical models to quantify survivability and introduces new metrics and heuristics to learn and identify essential services automatically. Current definitions of survivability are often limited since they either apply performance as measurement metric or use security metrics without any survivability context. Holistic survivability addresses such issues by providing a flexible framework where performance and security metrics can be tailored to the context of survivability. In other words, by applying performance and security our work aims to support key survivability properties such as recognition and resistance. The models and metrics here introduced are applied to SCADA systems as such systems insecurity is one of the motivations of this work. We believe that the proposed work goes beyond the current status of survivability models. Holistic survivability is flexible enough to support the addition of other metrics and can be easily used with different models. Because it is based on a well-known formalism its definition and implementation are easy to grasp and to apply. Perhaps more importantly, this proposed work is aimed to a new era where data is being produced and consumed on a large-scale. Holistic survivability aims to be the catalyst to new models based on data that will provide better and more accurate insights on the survivability of systems