A brink of failure and breach of security detection and recovery system

Abstract

In today's complex networks, a series of seemingly unrelated and minor events over an extended time period can escalate to catastrophic failure as well as alter the network's security posture. The interactions between these events are too subtle and occur over too long a time for people to recognize and respond to the impending outage or security vulnerability. This paper presents a new concept termed “brink of failure” and demonstrates its relationship to network security. The paper describes an automated Brink of Failure (BOF) and Breach of Security (BOS) Detection and Recovery System that correlates network events to recognize and diagnose BOF conditions and their impact on the network's security posture and also suggests remedial actions. All information is provided on a single display that can be integrated into network operations centers. Scenarios that demonstrate how this system can be used to proactively predict and prevent network outages are also identified. © 2003 Lucent Technologies Inc.