Intrusion Tolerance - Security's Next Big Thing?

An anonymous reader writes "DARPA's OASIS program consists of more than 20 research projects in intrusion-tolerant systems. The basic idea is to concede that systems will be penetrated by malware and hackers, but to keep operating anyway. Other projects take a wide variety of technical approaches to providing intrusion tolerance. MIT's Automatic Trust Management uses models of trust to choose from a variety of ways to achieve system goals; Duke/MCNC's SITAR (Scalable Intrusion Tolerant Architecture) adapts tricks from fault-tolerant systems and distributes decision-making; BBN-Illinois-Maryland-Boeing's ITUA employs unpredictable adaptation. Shutting down the military while waging war is not an option, but the idea of continuing to operating critical defense systems even after known penetration by hostile hackers or damaging worms will take some getting used to."

Comments

what?!?

[shokk]

So the idea is, have a vulnerability, get attacked, keep on trucking with the same vulnerability, continue to get pounded through the same vulnerability relentlessly by every script kiddie's scan, vendor never patches because we've all accepted that we can just live with the vulnerabilities, keep on suckin'?

From the MIT article, it sounds like some intelligence will shut some non-critical services down so that the core still runs, but isn't that what Intrusion Prevention is supposed to do? When you're talking military use, I expect the important areas to be surrounded by honeypots as part of the Intrusion Detection and Prevention.

Re:That's what war is all about!

[sn00ker]

You'd probably get an Insightful mod from me, if I had mod points and hadn't already posted, but:

If you want to fall back to a cold war/MAD mentality, here's a worst case scenario for you. Say that twenty years from now China launches an unexpected nuclear ICBM assult against the US. At the same time Chinese hackers attempt to infiltrate every known computer in NORAD and any SDI systems. Would you want the computers to automatically destroy themselves, thereby eliminating any chance of a timely defense or counterattack, or assume that the hackers haven't got full access and keep the computers going as long as possible since the other alternative is death?

If missile control/defence networks operate through networks that could be attacked from China, then the US really does deserve the nuclear annihilation that would befall it. Systems that have absolutely horrific consequences associated with their failure should never be attached to generally accessible systems.

GPL'ed intrustion resistance

[duplicatedAccount]

Shameless plug: Askemos is a GPL'ed incorruptible and intrustion resistant operating system (or application server for that matter).

byzantine fault tolerance

[Sajma]

Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a "traditional" distributed systems technique that enables intrusion resilience. BFT replicates a service such that the service continues to work correctly as long as less than one third of the replicas are comprimised. Combined with proactive recovery (periodically shutting down replicas and restarting them from a read-only disk), this can enable the system to survive an arbitrary number of compromises over its lifetime.