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Security Through Software Rejuvenation

Authors:
Chen-Yu Lee
Krishna M. Kavi
Mahadevan Gomathisankaran
Patrick Kamongi

Keywords: Rejuvenation; Malware; Security; Vulnerability

Abstract:
Software rejuvenation has been used to improve reliability of systems by periodically checkpointing and restarting them. In this paper, we propose to use rejuvenation as a mechanism to enhance the security of Cloud infrastructure and eliminate malware by continuous and periodic rejuvenation. To evaluate the effectiveness of rejuvenation in eliminating malware, we defined an experimental setup, and utilizing complete system rejuvenation, as well as application level rejuvenation we investigated which malware were eliminated. We also describe a cost model for rejuvenation so that one can determine how often systems and applications should be rejuvenated, trading cost against security. Our experiments and models show that rejuvenation once every 24 hours is cost-effective.

Pages: 347 to 353

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: October 12, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-367-4

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014