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Towards Diversity of COTS Software Applications: Reducing Risks of Widespread Faults and Attacks
Casassa Mont, Marco; Baldwin, Adrian; Beres, Yolanta; Harrison, Keith; Sadler, Martin; Shiu, Simon
HPL-2002-178
Keyword(s): COTS applications; diversity; faults; attacks; survivability; security; trust
Abstract: Recent IT attacks demonstrated how vulnerable consumers and enterprises are when adopting commercial and widely deployed operating systems, software applications and solutions. Diversity in software applications is fundamental to increase chances of survivability to faults and attacks. Current approaches to diversity are mainly based on the development of multiple versions of the same software, their parallel execution and the usage of voting mechanisms. Because of the high cost, they are used mainly for very critical and special cases. We introduce and discuss an alternative method to ensure diversity for common, widespread software applications without requiring additional computational resources. This method takes advantage of the componentisation of modern software solutions and enforces diversity at the installation time, by a random selection and deployment of critical software components. Randomisation criteria are adaptable to feedback gathered from software installations and affect software components' lifecycle. We describe a few encouraging results obtained from simulations.
15 Pages
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