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.