Integrated Models for System Reliability and Security Evaluation

Techniques for quantitative reliability evaluation have been developed and applied successfully in design and development of many applications such as power, aircraft, telecommunications, military, etc. With the development of computer systems, security has become an increasing concern. Security addresses confidentiality and integrity and availability of a given system and network among other issues. Ills now commonly accepted that security and traditional reliability represent two different aspects of overall dependability of a modern system or network. Actually, security and reliability share some common characteristics so that some areas of reliability theory and modeling techniques can be extended to security evaluation. This paper discusses both the concept and quantitative techniques in modeling reliability and security. An integrated approach for reliability and security evaluation is proposed to consider both the reliability and security risks in the development and deployment process. This approach incorporates fault-tolerant and intrusion-tolerant considerations early in the requirement and design phase and emphasizes operational measures of reliability and security throughout the entire development process. It provides a quantitative framework for reliability and security evaluation throughout the development cycle.