Organic resilience for tactical environments

Abstract

In this paper we present a tactical defense infrastructure for mission survivability based on three core inspirations from biological systems: multi-potentiation, feedback mechanisms, and redundancy. In tactical operational environments, these concepts may be realized through a combination of capabilities that include (1) dynamic allocation of resources for mission execution, (2) detection and identification of attacks and their effects, and (3) information sharing for system adaptation. As a proof-of-concept we introduce an extensible, multi-layer defense infrastructure inspired in the self-organization and resilience properties of biological systems. Two defense strategies are considered to validate the proposed model: a fast response consisting on rebooting a compromised system from a reference system image; and a slower response involving a process of identification of the attack, which then allows the node to change its base configuration and reboot to a state that is potentially immune to the same attack. Our experimental results show that the second strategy improves the overall resilience of the system for ongoing attacks after an initial exposure phase. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.