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

提案编号：美国国家科学基金会合作提案CCR-0311808和CCR-0311686标题：提高计算机系统安全性的自动化和自适应多样性摘要：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，所以任何一种病原体都不可能消灭或逃脱整个种群。 相比之下，今天的计算机系统在很大程度上是同质的，由一个或两个操作系统和少数几个软件供应商的一些常见应用程序压倒性地主导。 这一事实经常被攻击者利用，他们通过因特网蠕虫，如红色代码，利用一个缓冲区溢出漏洞，在短短9小时内感染了25万多个系统。该项目将开发自动和系统地使计算机系统多样化的方法-探索系统各级的多样性和各种目的，例如，使系统更难被破坏，使系统更难被破坏，甚至在成功的破坏之后，并且使成功的破坏更难逃避检测。 为了取得成功，这项工作中探索的许多机制必须隐藏或伪装有关攻击者的系统细节的信息，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.