Fault tolerance and system/network survivability - Essay Example

It will be located in the popular Australian Technology Park. The primary service provided by SCORP Forensics is consulting services. They also routinely deal with investigations relating to fraud, harassment, insider trading and a range of other highly sensitive security and defense issues. Some of the high profile civil or criminal cases handled by this division may result in disciplinary actions and argued in a court of common law. Due to the nature of business and high sensitivity work done by SCORP Forensics, the security of all aspects of its computer facility will be of the utmost importance.

As the facilities security consultant of SCORP Forensics, it is important to set-up safety measures in terms of survivability of system networks and fault tolerance of computer storage systems. The forensic laboratory (or forensic lab) will contain an analysis machine, image acquisition machine and eight docking stations. Only the docking stations are networked together with eight computer laptops assigned to each forensic investigator. The safety measures of the forensic lab will be the discussion of this report based on the forensic equipment and storage requirements.

SCORP Forensics increasingly depends on large-scale networked systems to conduct business, government, and defense forensic testing and investigations. Survivability of these systems is receiving increasing attention, particularly critical infrastructure protection. As part of its survivable systems initiative, it is compulsory to help foster a survivability network system and develop technologies to analyze and design survivability concepts [3, 10, 11]. Survivability analysis helps identify the essential functions which must survive attacks and failure, the effects of attacks and failures, the associated risks, and the architecture changes which could improve network system survivability.

We define survivability as a network system's capability to fulfill its mission (in a timely manner) in the presence of attacks, failures, or accidents. Unlike traditional security measures that require central control and administration, survivability addresses highly distributed, unbounded network environments with no central control or unified security policy. The focus of our survivability concept is on delivery of essential services and preservation of essential assets during attack and compromise, and timely recovery of full services and assets following attack.

We define essential services and assets as those system capabilities that are critical to fulfilling mission objectives. Survivability in the presence of attacks depends on three key system capabilities: resistance, recognition, and recovery. Resistance is a system's capability to repel attacks. Recognition is the capability to detect attacks as they occur and to evaluate the extent of damage and compromise. Recovery, a hallmark of survivability, is the capability to maintain essential services and assets during attack, limit the extent of damage, and restore full services following attack.

As an emerging discipline, survivability builds on existing disciplines, including security [14], fault tolerance [5] and reliability [1]. In this report, we focus exclusively on attacks, although our trace-based, compositional