Built for Survival

Critical national infrastructures are increasingly dependent upon open, large-scale, highly distributed, Internet-based applications. While there are substantial benefits there are also significant risks, such as those posed by common software vulnerabilities and the consequent susceptibility of networked systems to remote attacks. Traditional computer security cannot adequately protect these critical systems from current and emerging threats.

Survivability is the ability of a computing system to fulfill its mission, in a timely manner, in the presence of attacks, failures, or accidents. The mission must survive, not any individual component, nor (in the extreme) even the system itself. Does the concept of building instinctive survivability into computing systems offer insights that can help us achieve much higher degrees of critical infrastructure protection and assurance than today's prevailing approaches to cyber security? This talk will describe several of the key technical and policy research challenges associated with the general notion of survivability and with the concept of "building in" instinctive survivability. Finally, the potential impact that successful research in this area would have on the future capabilities of society's critical infrastructures will be discussed.

Bio

Howard F. Lipson is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the CERT Program at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute. Lipson has been a computer security researcher at CERT for seventeen years. He is also an adjunct professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy and an adjunct research faculty member at the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. He has played a major role in developing the foundational concepts and methodologies necessary to extend security research into the new realm of survivability, and was a chair of three IEEE Information Survivability Workshops. His May 2007 Capitol Hill briefing on survivability, "Cyber Security: Protecting Our Networks and Critical Infrastructure," was hosted by the US House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security and sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research interests include the analysis and design of survivable systems and architectures, software assurance, critical infrastructure protection (specifically the electric power grid), and the technical and public policy aspects of Internet traceability and anonymity.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Lipson was a systems design consultant, helping to manage the complexity and improve the usability of leading-edge software systems. Earlier, he was a computer scientist at AT&T Bell Labs, where he did exploratory development work on programming environments, executive information systems, and integrated network management tools. Lipson holds a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University.