Intrusion-tolerant middleware

Abstract

The advances made on the intrusion-tolerant middleware, developed by the Malicious-and Accidental-Fault Tolerance for Internet Applications (MAFTIA), for tolerating both accidental faults and malicious attacks in complex systems are discussed. The MAFTIA architecture selectively uses intrusion-tolerance mechanisms to build layers of progressively more trusted components and middleware subsystems from baseline untrusted components. Its three dimensions, hardware, local support, and distributed software, help applications operate securely across several hosts, even in the presence of malicious faults. MAFTIA supplies different solutions for different levels of threats and criticality, keeping the best possible performance-resilience trade-off. MAFTIA assumes a fairly severe fault model, assuming that hosts and the communication environment are asynchronous. The architecture is related to the algorithmic suites that implement communication and agreement among processes in different hosts.