Resilient Voting Mechanisms for Mission Survivability in Cyberspace: Combining Replication and Diversity
Charles Kamhoua · International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications · 2012
While information systems became ever more complex and the interdependence of these systems increased, mission-critical services should be survivable even in the presence of cyber attacks or internal failures.Node replication can be used to protect a mission-critical system against faults that may occur naturally or be caused by malicious attackers.The overall reliability increases by the number of replicas.However, when the replicas are a perfect copy of each other, a successful attack or failure in any node can be instantaneously repeated in all the other nodes.Eventually, the service of those nodes will discontinue, which may affect the system's mission.Therefore, it becomes evident that there must be more survivable approach with diversity among the replicas in mission-critical systems.In particular, this research investigates the best binary voting mechanism among replicas.Furthermore, with experimental results, we compare the simple majority mechanism with hierarchical decision process and discuss their trade-offs.