AWaRE - Towards Distributed Self-Management for Resilient Cyber Systems

Resilience is an important property of distributed cyber defence systems operating in complex, adversarial environments. While resilience can be realized through self-management, implementing distributed self-management poses several significant challenges. In this paper, we identify some of these challenges and present our initial work on an approach for cyber resilience called AWaRE. The novelty of AWaRE lies in the use of a conceptual, state-space-based design and reconstitution framework, combined with run-time models and distributed constraint satisfaction/optimization techniques for decision-making and coordination of system re-configurations. The run-time models are generated via an expressive domain-specific language enabling component, constraint and agent modeling as well as constraint problem decomposition and architectural self-organization. We realize AWaRE via a concrete software framework, focusing specifically on autonomic self-* properties pertaining to distributed system configuration, deployment and reliable operation. We demonstrate the value of AWaRE in the context of a simple, cloud-based enterprise scenario.