Collaborative Research: Automated and Adaptive Diversity for Improving Computer Systems Security

题目：提高计算机系统安全性的自动化和自适应多样性（Automated and Adaptive Diversity）。摘要：多样性是生物系统鲁棒性的重要来源。因为每个个体的特性略有不同，任何一种病原体都不太可能消灭或逃离整个种群。相比之下，今天的计算机系统在很大程度上是同质化的，被一两个操作系统和少数几个软件供应商的一些通用应用程序压倒性地控制着。这一事实经常被攻击者通过互联网蠕虫（如红色代码）利用，它利用一个缓冲区溢出漏洞在短短9小时内感染了超过25万个系统。该项目将开发自动和系统地使计算机系统多样化的方法-探索系统的各个层次和各种目的的多样性，例如，使系统更难以妥协，使系统即使在成功妥协后也更难以破坏，并使成功的妥协更难以逃避检测。为了成功，在这项工作中探索的许多机制必须对攻击者隐藏或伪装有关系统细节的信息，并且这个主题将成为几个项目的基础。

Proposal Number: NSF Collaborative Proposals CCR-0311808 andCCR-0311686Title: Automated and Adaptive Diversity for Improving Computer SystemSecurityPI: Stephanie ForrestAbstract: Diversity is an important source of robustness in biological systems. Because each individual has slightly different properties, it is unlikely that any single pathogen will eliminate or escape theentire population. By contrast, today's computer systems are largely homogeneous, being overwhelmingly dominated by one or two operating systems and a few common applications from a handful of softwarevendors. This fact is routinely exploited by attackers via Internet worms such as Code Red, which infected over 250,000 systems in just nine hours using a single buffer overflow vulnerability.The project will develop methods for diversifying computer systems automatically and systematically -- exploring diversity at various levels of a system and for various purposes, e.g., to make a systemmore difficult to compromise, to make a system more difficult to damage even after a successful compromise, and to make it more difficult for a successful compromise to evade detection. In orderto succeed, many of the mechanisms explored in this work must hide or disguise information about system specifics from an attacker, and this theme will underlie several of the projects.