Cornell Department of Computer Science Colloquium
4:15pm, October 4th, 2001
B17 Upson Hall

Survivability Analysis of Networked Systems

Jeannette M. Wing

Carnegie Mellon University

Survivability is the ability of a system to continue operating despite the presence of abnormal events such as accidental failures and malicious intrusions. Ensuring system survivability has increased in importance as critical infrastructures have become heavily dependent on computers. In this talk I present a systematic method for performing survivability analysis of networked systems. An architect injects failure and intrusion events into a system model and then, using off-the-shelf model checking technology, visualizes the effects of the injected events in the form of "scenario graphs." Additional annotations on these graphs enable further global reasoning, such as reliability, latency, and cost-benefit analyses, borrowing from the theory underlying Markov Decision Processes. I will illustrate our method on a simplistic model of the United States Payment System. This work is joint with Somesh Jha, now on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, and my graduate student Oleg Sheyner.

This Colloquium will be followed by a informal panel discussion on Research as a Career. The discussion will be located in the Upson Lounge at 5:30pm, and there will be FREE PIZZA to follow. Panelists include CS graduate students and eminent researchers.