Affiliations: School of Computing, Informatics, Decision Systems
Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA | U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory/RIGA, Rome, NY, USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Nong Ye, School of Computing, Informatics,
Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-8809,
USA. E-mail: nongye@gmail.com
Abstract: Three types of activities may run on computer and network systems at
the same time: services, security mechanisms, and attacks. Computer and network
systems should sustain legitimate cyber services even under attacks. In this
study, system impacts of services, security mechanisms and attacks are
investigated and used to develop strategies for system survivability.
Experiments are conducted to collect system dynamics data under two services of
voice communication and motion detection, two security mechanisms of data
encryption and intrusion detection, and five cyber attacks. Statistical
analyses are performed on the experimental data to identify system-wide impacts
of services, security mechanisms and attacks on system activities, state and
performance. The analytical results reveal the system impact characteristics of
these services, security mechanisms, and attacks on IO and file operations and
bytes, page and cache faults, memory usage, CPU usage, and network traffic. The
competition for system resources by all the activities in the system manifests
themselves predominantly in their competition for limited CPU time. This
competition for limited CPU time can be used as a strategy to ensure system
survivability by increasing the activity level of legitimate services to leave
less CPU time for attacks and thus suppress the level and system impacts of
attacks while sustaining CPU time for legitimate services.
Keywords: Computer and network services, security, attacks, system impacts, system survivability
