Mediators in infrastructure survivability enhancement

1. ABSTRACT A key research priority for the next decade is the protection of critical, software-intensive infrastructures-e.g., electric power, banking, telecommunications, and transportation. The problem is complicated by the need to enhance existing systems. We describe one approach to survivability enhancement. In 1997 the Internet failed when corrupt data was disseminated at the top level of the Domain Name System. We replicated this failure and developed a solution based on transparent insertion of mediators to enforce survivability policies. Our approach promises to ease survivability enhancement in two ways: transparent insertion eases system architectural evolution; and modularization of survivability policy implementations eases the evolution of both survivability policies and the systems into which our mediators are inserted. 1.1 Keywords