Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
16
Damage Quarantine and Recovery in Data
Processing Systems
Peng Liu
1
, Sushil Jajodia
2
, and Meng Yu
3
1
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
pliu@ist.psu.edu
2
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA
jajodia@gmu.edu
3
Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL 61455, USA
m-yu2@wiu.edu
Summary.
In this article, we address transparent Damage Quarantine and Recov-
ery (DQR), a very important problem faced today by a large number of mission,
life, and/or business-critical applications and information systems that must man-
age risk, business continuity, and assurance in the presence of severe cyber attacks.
Today, these critical applications still have a “good” chance to suffer from a big
“hit” from attacks. Due to data sharing, interdependencies, and interoperability,
the hit could greatly “amplify” its damage by causing catastrophic cascading ef-
fects, which may “force” an application to halt for hours or even days before the
application is recovered. In this paper, we first do a thorough discussion on the lim-
itations of traditional fault tolerance and failure recovery techniques in solving the
DQR problem. Then we present a systematic review on how the DQR problem is
being solved. Finally, we point out some remaining research issues in fully solving
the DQR problem.
1 Introduction
In this article, we address transparent Damage Quarantine and Recovery
(DQR), an important problem faced today by a large number of mission/life/
business-critical applications. These applications are the cornerstones of a
variety of crucial information systems that must manage risk, business con-
tinuity, and data assurance in the presence of severe cyber attacks. Today,
many of the nation's critical infrastructures (e.g., financial services, telecom-
munication infrastructure, transportation control) rely on these information
systems to function.
There are at least two main reasons on why mission/life/business-critical
applications have an urgent need for transparent damage quarantine and re-
covery. Firstly, despite that significant progress has been made in protecting
applications and systems, mission/life/business-critical applications still have
