Analysis of intrusion-tolerant architectures for Web Servers

A variety of mission critical applications need to continue to operate or provide a minimal level of services even when they are under attack or have been partially compromised; hence the need for intrusion tolerant architecture. The research focus of Intrusion Tolerant Architecture is on how to detect as many attacks as possible, as soon as we can, and at the same time to reduce the false alarm rate. This paper presents a survey of different intrusion-tolerant architectures (based on intelligent adaptive reconfiguration) for Web Server highlighting on the threat analysis. Further, we want to point out potential pitfalls as well as challenging issues need to be addressed by an intrusion tolerant architecture. We believe that the results of this evaluation will help system architects to for building more secure and survivable server systems.

I. Introduction

A Web Server is a computer host configured and connected to the internet, for serving web pages on request. Information on public web servers are accessed by people anywhere on the internet. Since web servers are open to public access, they can be subjected to attempts by hackers to compromise the server. Intrusion tolerance has the potential to become a very useful approach in building server architectures that withstand attacks.