Inoculating software for survivability

Abstract

An old adage holds true for software: you can build a stronger system by first breaking it • ANUP K. GHOSH AND JEFFREY M. VOAS ^^ ^'^^^Y ^998, several dozen computer systems in U.S. military installations and government facilities were successfully hacked, resulting in a fullscale Defense Department response now known as Operation Solar Sunrise. The attacks successfully broke into systems belonging to the Navy and Air Force as well as to federally funded research laboratories including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratories, U.C. Berkeley, and MIT. Although no classified systems were allegedly compromised,the attackers were able to obtain system privileges that could be used to read password files, delete files, or create back doors for later re-entry. Despite being called "the most organized and systematic attack" to date against the Department of Defense systems by the U.S. DeputyDefense Secretary, these attacks were not the work of an organized terrorist group or nation; rather, authorities believe two northern California teenagers under the tutelage of an Israeli computer hacker were responsible for breaking into these systems, simply because they could.

Security in the Information Society

“…In [Ghosh and Voas, 1999, pages 38-44), the problem of software reliability with regards to commercial off-the-shell (CarS) software is examined and a method of software inoculation is presented. Using such an inoculation technique, a filtering layer is put in place that protects the operating system's system calls from invocations with invalid parameters.…”

“…Finally, methods of inoculation such as those presented in [Ghosh and Voas, 1999] could provide a level of security by filtering malicious event messages. Although this degrades performance, it is a solution to COTS software.…”

4.3.2 Systems Engineering Approach To Information Assurance

“…Using simple, public tools such as the web browser they could quietly penetrate organizations and commit crimes such as theft of sensitive data (credit card information, etc.) with a very low risk of getting caught (Ghosh and Voas 1999).…”

A holistic approach to service survivability

“…Ghosh, et al [31] propose "fault injection analysis" applied to software, while Strunk, et al [70] apply a lowlevel approach: they propose an intrusion detection and recovery model at the storage layer. Kreidl, et al [43] propose a formalized feedback-driven model for individual COTS applications.…”