Models of reliability of fault-tolerant software under cyber-attacks

This paper offers a new approach to modelling the effect of cyber-attacks on reliability of software used in industrial control applications. The model is based on the view that successful cyber-attacks introduce failure regions, which are not present in non-compromised software. The model is then extended to cover a fault tolerant architecture, such as the 1-out-of-2 software, popular for building industrial protection systems. The model is used to study the effectiveness of software maintenance policies such as patching and "cleansing" ("proactive recovery") under different adversary models ranging from independent attacks to sophisticated synchronized attacks on the channels. We demonstrate that the effect of attacks on reliability of diverse software significantly depends on the adversary model. Under synchronized attacks system reliability may be more than an order of magnitude worse than under independent attacks on the channels. These findings, although not surprising, highlight the importance of using an adequate adversary model in the assessment of how effective various cyber-security controls are.