A Security Architecture for Survivable Systems

The protection of survivability mechanisms against security attacks is a difficult but extremely important problem. If this mechanism were penetrated in any particular system, the adversary might gain control of the entire associated information system. What is needed is a mechanism to preserve the execution integrity of software despite its untrust- worthy execution environment. In this paper, we present a comprehensive strategy for protecting survivability mechanisms against attack by adversaries with access to signifi- cant resources. The approach uses a variety of forms of diversity at the system level and a general strategy for defeating static analysis at the local level. We refer to the approach to defeating static analysis as One-Way translation and describe the concepts, the underly- ing theory, the performance, and the implementation.

Knight, John, and Chenxi Wang. "A Security Architecture for Survivable Systems." University of Virginia Dept. of Computer Science Tech Report (2000).