Reliability, Fault Tolerance and Other Critical Components for Survivability in Information Warfare

The information revolution has caused many aspects of human activity to critically depend on a wide variety of physically existing or virtual technological achievements such as electronic devices, computer systems, algorithms, cloud resources, artificial intelligence hardware and software entities etc. Many of these systems are used in highly sensitive contexts, such as military applications. This implies the existence of an increasing number of unintentional disturbances or malicious attacks. Successful operation requires qualities such as robustness, fault tolerance, reliability, availability and security. All these may be summarized by the title of survivability. Survivability of critical systems working for sensitive applications involves the ability to provide uninterrupted operation under severe disturbances, gracefully degrade when limiting conditions are reached and maintain the ability to resume normal service once the disturbances have been removed. Survivability is an important, even - though non – functional, lifecycle property of many engineering systems. Further desirable elements of survivability include the ability of systems to recognize and resist attacks or accidents, adapt in order to avoid them and modify their behavior in order to diminish the effects of similar future occurrences. This chapter presents a quantitative approach to assessing survivability and an account of survivability in military systems. A scheme for survivability via replica diversity in the implementation of the AES algorithm is then presented. Following that, an algorithm for adaptive attack aversion in user authentication systems is presented that is based on Boolean transformations. An approach for increased survivability in Internet of Things (IoT) systems is then presented. Finally, an algorithm for secure data storage in cloud resources is presented that allows attack detection and avoidance.