Semantic Foundations for Survivable System Analysis and Design

A Survivability Research Agenda Survivability is the capability of an information system to support critical enterprise missions in adverse environments of attacks, failures, and accidents [Ellison et al 1999]. A research program in survivability must therefore address both systems and the environments within which they operate. Survivability is a combination of quality attributes, including security, reliability, safety, fault tolerance, dependability, and others [Mead et al 2000]. The SEI CERT Coordination Center, in cooperation with other researchers, has embarked on a multi-year, dual-thread research program, one thread to create engineering practices for survivable system design and development, the other to create engineering practices for analysis and definition of adverse environments. We believe that lack of theoretical foundations in both areas has been a serious impediment to survivable system development. In essence, we seek to move beyond natural language descriptions of survivability to a computational capability for engineering analysis of survivability properties. Accordingly, our agenda is to progress from theoretical foundations, to formal language representations, to engineering practices. We take it as an article of faith that to be effective, engineering practices must be based on rigorous foundations.