On the Reliability and Availability of Replicated and Rejuvenating Systems Under Stealth Attacks and Intrusions

Abstract This paper considers the estimation of re-liability and availability of intrusion-tolerant systems subject to non-detectable intrusions caused by stealth attacks. We observe that typical intrusion tolerance techniques may in certain circumstances worsen the dependability properties they were meant to improve. We model intrusions as a probabilistic effect of adver-sarial efforts and analyze different strategies of attack and rejuvenation. We compare several configurations of intrusion-tolerant replication and proactive rejuve-nation, and varying mission times and expected times to node-intrusion. In doing so, we identify thresholds that distinguish between improvement and degradation of dependability, with a focus on security. We highlight the complementarity of replication and rejuvenation, showing improvements of resilience not attainable with any of the techniques alone, but possible when they are combined. We advocate the need for thorougher system models, by showing vulnerabilities arising from incomplete specifications. Keywords reliability · availability · resilience · security · dependability · intrusion tolerance · stealthiness · replication · rejuvenation · models