Articles

Characterizing Self-healing Software Systems

Keromytis, Angelos D.

The introduction of self-healing capabilities to software systems could offer a way to alter the current, unfavorable imbalance in the software security arms race. Consequently, self-healing software systems have emerged as a research area of particular interest in recent years. Motivated by the inability of traditional techniques to guarantee software integrity and availability, especially against motivated human adversaries, self-healing approaches are meant to complement existing approaches to security. In this paper, we provide a first attempt to characterize self-healing software systems by surveying some of the existing work in the field. We focus on systems that effect structural changes to the software under protection, as opposed to block-level system reconfiguration. Our goal is to begin mapping the space of software self-healing capabilities. We believe this to be a necessary first step in exploring the boundaries of the research space and understanding the possibilities that such systems enable, as well as determining the risks and limitations inherent in automatic-reaction schemes.

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Title
Computer Network Security: Fourth International Conference on Mathematical Methods, Models, and Architectures for Computer Network Security, MMM-ACNS 2007, St. Petersburg, Russia, September 13-15, 2007: Proceedings
Publisher
Springer
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73986-9_2

More About This Work

Academic Units
Computer Science
Series
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 1
Published Here
March 14, 2012