Designing and Implementing a Diversity Policy for Intrusion-Tolerant Systems

Abstract

Research on intrusion-tolerant systems (ITSs) is being conducted to protect critical systems which provide useful information services. To provide services reliably, these critical systems must not have even a single point of failure (SPOF). Therefore, most ITSs employ redundant components to eliminate the SPOF problem and improve system reliability. However, systems that include identical components have common vulnerabilities that can be exploited to attack the servers. Attackers prefer to exploit these common vulnerabilities rather than general vulnerabilities because the former might provide an opportunity to compromise several servers. In this study, we analyze software vulnerability data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Based on the analysis results, we present a scheme that finds software combinations that minimize the risk of common vulnerabilities. We implement this scheme with CSIM20, and simulation results prove that the proposed scheme is appropriate for a recovery-based intrusion tolerant architecture.