Diversity-Based Approaches to Software Systems Security

Software systems security represents a major concern as cyber-attacks continue to grow in number and sophistication. In addition to the increasing complexity and interconnection of modern information systems, these systems run significant similar software. This is known as IT monoculture. As a consequence, software systems share common vulnerabilities, which enable the spread of malware. The principle of diversity can help in mitigating the negative effects of IT monoculture on security. One important category of the diversity-based software approaches for security purposes focuses on enabling efficient and effective dynamic monitoring of software system behavior in operation. In this paper, we present briefly these approaches and we propose a new approach which aims at generating dynamically a diverse set of lightweight traces. We initiate the discussion of some research issues which will be the focus of our future research work.