Evaluating the survivability of Intrusion Tolerant Database systems and the impact of intrusion detection deficiencies

The immaturity of current intrusion detection techniques limits traditional security mechanisms in surviving malicious attacks. Intrusion tolerance approaches have emerged to overcome these limitations. However, to what extent an intrusion tolerant system can mitigate detection deficiencies is still unknown. In this paper, we focus on quantifying the capability of a resilient database system surviving intrusions. An Intrusion Tolerant DataBase system (ITDB) is studied as an example. Our experimental results indicate that ITDB can maintain the desired level of data integrity and availability without being seriously affected by various intrusion detection deficiencies. The impact of intrusion tolerance operations on performance is also evaluated.