A declarative approach to hardening services against QoS vulnerabilities

Abstract

Abstract-The Quality of Service (QoS) in a distributed service-oriented application can be negatively affected by a variety of factors. Network volatility, hostile exploits, poor service management, all can prevent a service-oriented application from delivering its functionality to the user. This paper puts forward a novel approach to improving the reliability, security, and availability of service-oriented applications. To counter service vulnerabilities, a special service detects vulnerabilities as they emerge at runtime, and then hardens the applications by dynamically deploying special components. The novelty of our approach lies in using a declarative framework to express both vulnerabilities and hardening strategies in a domain-specific language, independent of the service infrastructure in place. Thus, our approach will make it possible to harden serviceoriented applications in a disciplined and systematic fashion.

Effective fusion and separation of distribution, fault-tolerance, and energy-efficiency concerns

“…Figure 4.8 shows these fault-handling procedures. First, a service administrator needs to provide fault tolerance descriptions written in Fault-Tolerance Description Language (FTDL) [36,77], a domain-specific language we have developed earlier for expressing fault handling strategies. These descriptions parameterize a fault handling component that detects the specified faults and then counteracts their effect by executing the specified handling strategies.…”

“…In our previous work [36,77], we explored how remote services can be made resilient against failures using domain-specific languages-Hardening Policy Language (HPL) [77] and Fault Tolerance Description Language (FTDL) [36]. In this work, we combined the features of these two languages-language constructs from FTDL and a runtime system from HPL-to create a refactoring transformation that automatically adds fault tolerance functionality.…”

“…These actions are implemented as part of a library. In our prior work, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach to improve the reliability of OSGi-based systems [77,82].…”

“…The research presented in this dissertation was published in the proceedings of Middleware'09 [82], SCC '10 [84], MESOCA'11 [77], ICDCS'12 [78], and ICSM'13 [80] and in the journals of Service Oriented Computing and Applications [83], Information and Software Technology [79], IEEE Computer [152], and Automated Software Engineering [81]. Major contributions of this research include:…”

“…Hardening distributed applications with resiliency against partial failures [82,77]: A declarative approach for hardening distributed applications with resiliency against partial failures-we introduce a domain-specific language for describing both failures and the hardening strategies to eliminate them.…”