Modeling and Evaluating the Survivability of an Intrusion Tolerant Database System

Abstract

The immaturity of current intrusion detection techniques limits the traditional security systems in surviving malicious attacks. Intrusion tolerance approaches have emerged to overcome these limitations. Before intrusion tolerance is accepted as an approach to security, there must be quantitative methods to measure its survivability. However, there are very few attempts to do quantitative, model-based evaluation of the survivability of intrusion tolerant systems, especially in database field. In this paper, we focus on modeling the behaviors of an intrusion tolerant database system in the presence of attacks. Quantitative measures are proposed to characterize the capability of a resilient database system surviving intrusions. An Intrusion Tolerant DataBase system (ITDB) is studied as an example. Our experimental results validate the models we proposed. Survivability evaluation is also conducted to study the impact of attack intensity and various system deficiencies on the survivability.