OS diversity for intrusion tolerance: Myth or reality?

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 systems (OS) vulnerability data from the NIST National Vulnerability Database. We have analyzed the vulnerabilities of 11 different OSes over a period of roughly 15 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 OSes. Hence, our analysis provides a strong indication that building a system with diverse OSes may be a useful technique to improve its intrusion tolerance capabilities

Enhancing Fault / Intrusion Tolerance through Design and Configuration Diversity

Fault/intrusion tolerance is usually the only viable way of improving the system dependability and security in the presence of continuously evolving threats. Many of the solutions in the literature concern a specific snapshot in the production or deployment of a fault-tolerant system and no immediate considerations are made about how the system should evolve to deal with novel threats. In this paper we outline and evaluate a set of operating systems’ and applications’ reconfiguration rules which can be used to modify the state of a system replica prior to deployment or in between recoveries, and hence increase the replicas chance of a longer intrusion-free operation

FOREVER: Fault/intrusiOn REmoVal through Evolution & Recovery

The goal of the FOREVER project is to develop a service for Fault/intrusiOn REmoVal through Evolution & Recovery. In order to achieve this goal, our work addresses three main tasks: the definition of the FOREVER service architecture; the analysis of how diversity techniques can improve resilience; and the evaluation of the FOREVER service. The FOREVER service is an important contribution to intrustion-tolerant replication middleware and significantly enhances the resilience

The TClouds platform: concept, architecture and instantiations

TClouds is a EU project targeted at improving the security and the high-availability of the cloud infrastructures and services, especially for supporting critical applications. This paper presents in an integrated way the TClouds platform and the main outcomes of the project

The TClouds Platform: From the Concept to the Implementation of Benchmark Scenarios

TClouds was an EU project (2010-2013) targeted at improving the security and the dependability of cloud infrastructures and services, especially for supporting critical applications. During the project, the participants of the consortium developed a platform containing a portfolio of solutions for improving the state of the art in cloud security and dependability. Here we present an overview of these solutions and two examples of how they can be integrated to provide security for critical cloud-based applications

The TClouds platform: concept, architecture and instantiations

TClouds is a EU project targeted at improving the security and the high-availability of the cloud infrastructures and services, especially for supporting critical applications. This paper presents in an integrated way the TClouds platform and the main outcomes of the project