Improving complex distributed software system availability through information hiding

Abstract

For distributed software systems, ensuring their availability under intentional attacks is critical. Traffic analysis, conducted by the attacker, could reveal the protocol being carried out by the components.Furthermore, having inferred the protocol, the attacker can use the pattern of the messages as a guide to the most critical components. We thwart these directed attacks by using message forwarding to reduce traffic differences, thus diverge attackers from targeted attack to random attack, which probabilistically prolongs the availability of important components in the system. The simulation results also show that message forwarding effectively balance the traffic flow and hence indicate the validity of our approach.

Optimal Voting Strategy against Random and Targeted Attacks

“…First, the system models are different. In this paper, the system reliability depends on the reliability of a set of selected voting replicas and whether they are compromised or not, while in Wang et al (2010Wang et al ( , 2011, the system reliability is the probability that all critical components survive the attacks. Second, the protection approaches are different.…”

“…Our earlier work focused on using an information hiding approach to prevent the attackers from quickly identifying the location of critical components in the system (Wang, Leiferman, Ren, Kwiat, & Li, 2010) and deciding optimal resource allocation for improving system reliability under random attack (Wang, Ren, Yue, & Kwiat, 2010, 2011. The current work differs from the previous work in two aspects.…”