Vulnerability Analysis of Faults/Attacks in Network Centric Systems

Network Centric Systems (NCS) and their applications have been growing at an amazing rate, the vulnerability of these systems and applications are also increasing because the intruder tools and attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. To make network systems reliable and robust it becomes highly essential to develop on-line monitoring, analyzing, and quantifying the behavior of networks and applications (vulnerability metrics) under a wide range of faults/attacks. In this paper, we present an agent-based framework and vulnerability metrics to analyze and quantify the impact of faults/attacks on networked systems. This analysis helps us determine the most critical components in the network, the failure of which might lead to a massive network outage or performance degradation and the vulnerability metrics that can be integrated with the control and management system to achieve proactive responses to faults/attacks and thus minimizes the impacts of these attacks and improve survivability of network infrastructure and services. Our approach is based on deploying software agents on routers, clients and servers to continuously monitor the vulnerability metrics that can be used to achieve self-healing and protecting services. We present through simulations how the proposed vulnerability metrics can be used to quantify the impacts of faults/attacks on various components of networked systems and how they can be used to proactively achieve self-healing and protecting services.