Building survivable services using redundancy and adaptation

Survivable systems-that is, systems that can continue to provide service despite failures, intrusions, and other threats-are increasingly needed in a wide variety of civilian and military application areas. As a step toward realizing such systems, this paper advocates the use of redundancy and adaptation to build survivable services that can provide core functionality for implementing survivability in networked environments. An approach to building such services using these techniques is described and a concrete example involving a survivable communication service is given. This service is based on Cactus, a system for building highly configurable network protocols that offers the flexibility needed to easily add redundant and adaptive components. Initial performance results for a prototype implementation of the communication service built using Cactus/C2.1 running on Linux are also given.