Diverse virtual replicas for improving intrusion tolerance in cloud
Minzhe Guo, Prabir Bhattacharya · 2014
Intrusion tolerance is important for services in cloud to continue functioning while under attack. Byzantine fault-tolerant replication is considered a fundamental component of intrusion tolerant systems. However, the monoculture of replicas can render the theoretical properties of Byzantine fault-tolerant system ineffective, even when proactive recovery techniques are employed. This paper exploits the design diversity available from off-the-shelf operating system products and studies how to diversify the configurations of virtual replicas for improving the resilience of the service in the presence of attacks. A game-theoretic model is proposed for studying the optimal diversification strategy for the system defender and an efficient algorithm is designed to approximate the optimal defense strategies in large games.