The Infrastructure of modern society is controlled by software systems. These systems are vulnerable to attacks; several such attacks, launched by "recreation hackers" have already led to severe disruption. However, a concerted and planned attack whose goal is to reap harm could lead to catastrophic results (for example, by disabling the computers that control the electrical power grid for a sustained period of time). The survivability of such information systems in the face of attacks is therefore an area of extreme importance to society. This paper is set in the context of self-adaptive survivable systems: software that judges the trustworthiness of the computational resources in its environment and which chooses how to achieve its goals in light of this trust model. Each self-adaptive survivable system detects and diagnoses compromises of its resources, taking whatever actions are necessary to recover from attack. In addition, a long-term monitoring system collects eviden...
Howard E. Shrobe