Treffer: Correct-by-Construction Attack-Tolerant Systems

The purpose of the Cornell research on Correct-by-construction attack - tolerant systems is to increase the capabilities of computer scientists and software engineers to build highly reliable and adaptive cloud based computing systems and demonstrate these capabilities on prototype systems. This research will also provide the Department of Defense with advanced systems and methods for cyber-warfare. The research on this AFRL/DARPA project created new technology to render cloud based computing more resistant to cyber - attack and more capable of monitoring system state. The new technology was deployed and tested in a distributed database. It could be deployed in critical DoD systems. In the course of this project, the Cornell team strengthened its formal tools and extended the science behind advanced formal methods. The project also educated exceptional graduate students in this new technology and the computer science behind it. The enriched science base and consequent advanced technology provide a firm basis for investigating other aspects of distributed systems, such as how to make use of execution monitoring to adapt to cyber - attacks that are based on invalidating the mathematical assumptions on which verification is based. The deployment of verified systems revealed to the Cornell team the limits of formal guarantees and opened new lines of investigation with the potential to combine detailed formal knowledge of system potential with evidence from anomalous behavior to react to potential attacks and discover remedies based on operating data. ; Sponsored in part by DARPA.