Functionality defense by heterogeneity: a new paradigm for securing systems

The human race has evolved and thrived despite perpetually being attacked by different kinds of viruses, infections, diseases, etc. The body´s natural immune system and self healing mechanism as well as the assisted healing systems in human communities has played a major role in this accomplishment. This model has served as an inspiration for the development of a new paradigm for security that we have proposed in this paper. While most security systems focus on defense of a single machine or a cluster of machines we have taken a radically different approach to security. We look at defense of functionalities rather than systems in the traditional sense. In this paper, we propose a new way to look at security called the functionality (such as e-mail server, Web services server, etc) defense by heterogeneity. Further we present an analysis, architecture and an algorithm for defending functionality.