Characterizing software self-healing systems

The introduction of self-healing capabilities to software systems could offer a way to alter the current, unfavorable imbalance in the software security arms race. Consequently, self-healing software systems have emerged as a research area of particular interest in recent years. Motivated by the inability of traditional techniques to guarantee software integrity and availability, especially against motivated human adversaries, self-healing approaches are meant to complement existing approaches to security. In this paper, we provide a first attempt to characterize self-healing software systems by surveying some of the existing work in the field. We focus on systems that effect structural changes to the software under protection, as opposed to block-level system reconfiguration. Our goal is to begin mapping the space of software self-healing capabilities. We believe this to be a necessary first step in exploring the boundaries of the research space and understanding the possibilities that such systems enable, as well as determining the risks and limitations inherent in automatic-reaction schemes.