Visible to the public Resilience Requirements, Design, and Testing - January 2017Conflict Detection Enabled

Public Audience
PI(s):  Kevin Sullivan, Mladen Vouk, Ehab Al-Shaer
Researchers: Gaith Husari and Mohamed Alsaleh (UNCC), Anoosha Vangaveeti (NCSU), Chong Tang (UVA)

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED

Characterization of attack-resiliency of software based systems needs to be done from its very inception because without such characterization attack resiliency is not properly testable or implementable.

  • Resilient Architectures - vulnerability avoidance, evaluation and tolerance strategies and architectures.
  • Security Metrics and Models - development of metrics and models for static and dynamic assessment of resilience of software.

PUBLICATIONS

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ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Cyber resilience requires the deployment of Active Cyber Defense (ACD) capabilities that enable timely and scalable reconfiguration of the cyber system (network devices and/or hosts) to respond to cyber threats and mitigate potential risks automatically. In our project, we developed a formal specification to define ACD strategies as a set of reconfiguration actions that may be applied sequentially or in parallel. Each ACD action is associated with an object and actuator. We also define a formal specification to define mission invariants (requirements) in term of reachability, security and QoS constraints. The proposed formal specifications of ACD and cyber mission invariants enable security operators and analysts to define, analyze and validate the correctness of ACD operations before deployment.