Analysis of operating system diversity for intrusion tolerance

One of the key benefits of using intrusion-tolerant systems is the possibility of ensuring correct behavior in the presence of attacks and intrusions. These security gains are directly dependent on the components exhibiting failure diversity. To what extent failure diversity is observed in practical deployment depends on how diverse are the components that constitute the system. In this paper, we present a study with operating system's (OS's) vulnerability data from the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). We have analyzed the vulnerabilities of 11 different OSs over a period of 18 years, to check how many of these vulnerabilities occur in more than one OS. We found this number to be low for several combinations of OSs. Hence, although there are a few caveats on the use of NVD data to support definitive conclusions, our analysis shows that by selecting appropriate OSs, one can preclude (or reduce substantially) common vulnerabilities from occurring in the replicas of the intrusion-tolerant system

How open is open enough?: Melding proprietary and open source platform strategies

Computer platforms provide an integrated architecture of hardware and software standards as a basis for developing complementary assets. The most successful platforms were owned by proprietary sponsors that controlled platform evolution and appropriated associated rewards. Responding to the Internet and open source systems, three traditional vendors of proprietary platforms experimented with hybrid strategies which attempted to combine the advantages of open source software while retaining control and differentiation. Such hybrid standards strategies reflect the competing imperatives for adoption and appropriability, and suggest the conditions under which such strategies may be preferable to either the purely open or purely proprietary alternatives

The HSS/SNiC : a conceptual framework for collapsing security down to the physical layer

This work details the concept of a novel network security model called the Super NIC (SNIC) and a Hybrid Super Switch (HSS). The design will ultimately incorporate deep packet inspection (DPI), intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS) functions, as well as network access control technologies therefore making all end-point network devices inherently secure. The SNIC and HSS functions are modelled using a transparent GNU/Linux Bridge with the Netfilter framework

Performance evaluation of an open distributed platform for realistic traffic generation

Network researchers have dedicated a notable part of their efforts to the area of modeling traffic and to the implementation of efficient traffic generators. We feel that there is a strong demand for traffic generators capable to reproduce realistic traffic patterns according to theoretical models and at the same time with high performance. This work presents an open distributed platform for traffic generation that we called distributed internet traffic generator (D-ITG), capable of producing traffic (network, transport and application layer) at packet level and of accurately replicating appropriate stochastic processes for both inter departure time (IDT) and packet size (PS) random variables. We implemented two different versions of our distributed generator. In the first one, a log server is in charge of recording the information transmitted by senders and receivers and these communications are based either on TCP or UDP. In the other one, senders and receivers make use of the MPI library. In this work a complete performance comparison among the centralized version and the two distributed versions of D-ITG is presented

Unikernels: the next stage of Linux’s dominance

Unikernels have demonstrated enormous advantages over Linux in many important domains, causing some to propose that the days of Linux's dominance may be coming to an end. On the contrary, we believe that unikernels' advantages represent the next natural evolution for Linux, as it can adopt the best ideas from the unikernel approach and, along with its battle-tested codebase and large open source community, continue to dominate. In this paper, we posit that an upstreamable unikernel target is achievable from the Linux kernel, and, through an early Linux unikernel prototype, demonstrate that some simple changes can bring dramatic performance advantages.Accepted manuscrip