Intrusion Tolerance in Distributed Middleware

Abstract

Many existing and new applications rely on several layers of middleware services that must be able to withstand intrusions and attacks from a very wide range of players. In this paper we discuss the concept of Intrusion Tolerance in distributed middleware. We start by presenting a threat analysis of the current commercial middleware technologies. We then discuss basic intrusion tolerance techniques such as Fragmentation-Redundancy-Scattering (FRS) and Threshold Cryptography. Then follows a description of a generic architecture that builds upon these techniques to compensate for intrusion vulnerabilities in commercial middleware, and finally we briefly describe how this architecture can be generalized.