Modeling and analysis of network resilience : the security perspective

The increased impact of global Internet in our daily lives is a continuous challenge for those who are responsible for their design, planning, implementation and administration. As the Internet becomes more important to citizens, organizations and nations, more pressure is placed in their reliability, availability and security or, in other terms, in its Resilience. Because Internet was not initially designed to support the actual levels of responsibility in the global economy, it is now evident that new paradigms and enhancements are needed to make this a resilient network. From the three disciplines that mainly characterize network resilience, security is one of the most challenging. In fact, the range of security threats that nowadays affect Internet is immense and increasingly complex, with the beginning of a new era where the concept of cyber-wars between nations becomes reality. One of the most relevant security threats is the malware and botnet phenomenon. Despite the development of several different types of countermeasures to fight these threats during more than a decade, this continues to be a field with big challenges and where new and solid improvements are needed