Trusted component sharing by runtime test and immunization for survivable distributed systems

Abstract

As information systems became ever more complex and the interdependence of these systems increase, the survivability picture became more and more complicated. The need for survivability is most pressing for mission-critical systems, especially when they are integrated with other COTS products or services. When components are exported from a remote system to a local system under different administration and deployed in different environments, we cannot guarantee the proper execution of those remote components in the currently working environment. Therefore, in the runtime, we should consider the component failures (in particular, remote components) that may either occur genuinely due to poor implementation or the failures that occurred during the integration with other components in the system. In this paper, we introduce a generic architecture and mechanisms for dynamic component-failure detection and immunization for survivable distributed systems. We have also developed a prototype system based on our approaches as a proof of our ideas. Copyright © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.