Software Self-Healing Using Collaborative Application Communities

Software monocultures are usually considered dangerous because their size and uniformity represent the potential for costly and widespread damage. The emerging concept of collaborative security provides the opportunity to re-examine the utility of software monoculture by exploiting the homogeneity and scale that typically define large software monocultures. Monoculture can be leveraged to improve an application’s overall security and reliability. We introduce and explore the concept of Application Communities: collections of large numbers of independent instances of the same application. Members of an application community share the burden of monitoring for flaws and attacks, and notify the rest of the community when such are detected. Appropriate mitigation mechanisms are then deployed against the newly discovered fault. We explore the concept of an application community and determine its feasibility through analytical modeling and a prototype implementation focusing on software ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: NDSS
• Authors: Michael E. Locasto, Stelios Sidiroglou, Angelos D. Keromytis
• Keywords: Application Communities, Application Community, Computer Networks, NDSS 2006, Software Monocultures