Investigation of intrusion tolerance for COTS middleware

Reliance of critical and other commonly used information systems on COTS middleware (CORBA, MOM, Web servers, etc.) has continued to grow tremendously in the past few years. However, COTS middleware is generally too weak to handle intrusions (i.e., information attacks), thus making critical and commonly used information systems highly vulnerable. In this paper, we evaluate the possible intrusion scenarios associated with today's commercial middleware platforms and discuss the possible impacts. We also briefly describe our approach based on the concepts of Fragmentation-Redundancy-Scattering (FRS) to provide intrusion tolerance to some of these intrusion threats and the utilities provided by the middleware to implement needed functionality. Finally, we set the stage for our current and future work for applying broad variety of FRS algorithms to a broad spectrum of COTS Middleware.