Abstract
Despite the deployment of preventive security mechanisms to protect the assets and computing platforms of users, intrusions eventually occur. We propose a novel intrusion survivability approach to withstand ongoing intrusions. Our approach relies on an orchestration of fine-grained recovery and per-service responses (e.g., privileges removal). Such an approach may put the system into a degraded mode. This degraded mode prevents attackers to reinfect the system or to achieve their goals if they managed to reinfect it. It maintains the availability of core functions while waiting for patches to be deployed. We devised a cost-sensitive response selection process to ensure that while the service is in a degraded mode, its core functions are still operating. We built a Linux-based prototype and evaluated the effectiveness of our approach against different types of intrusions. The results show that our solution removes the effects of the intrusions, that it can select appropriate responses, and that it allows services to survive when reinfected. In terms of performance overhead, in most cases, we observed a small overhead, except in the rare case of services that write many small files asynchronously in a burst, where we observed a higher but acceptable overhead.
Highlights
Despite progress in preventive security mechanisms such as cryptography, secure coding practices, or network security, given time, an intrusion will eventually occur
7 EVALUATION We performed an experimental evaluation of our approach to answer the following questions: (1) How effective are our responses at stopping malicious behaviors in case a service is compromised? (2) How effective is our approach at selecting cost-sensitive responses that withstand an intrusion? (3) What is the impact of our solution on the availability or responsiveness of the services? (4) How much overhead does our solution incur on the system resources? (5) Do services continue to function when they are restored with less privileges than they initially needed?
The setup consisted of an isolated network connected to the Internet with multiple Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), two Virtual Machines (VMs), and a workstation
Summary
Despite progress in preventive security mechanisms such as cryptography, secure coding practices, or network security, given time, an intrusion will eventually occur. Such a case may happen due to technical reasons (e.g., a misconfiguration, a system not updated, or an unknown vulnerability) and economic reasons [49] (e.g., do the benefits of an intrusion for criminals outweigh their costs?). It means that we should build systems to prevent intrusions, and to detect and survive them.
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