International Infrastructure Survivability Workshop (IISW'04)

Overloads, Attacks and Failures: the Trade-off against Time

in conjunction with the 25th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS04) December 5-8, 2004 Lisbon, Portugal

CALL FOR PAPERS

Society today is increasingly dependent on critical infrastructures that constitute the backbone for delivery of its essential services. Many critical services such as power supplies, public transport, telecommunications, banking and finance, and defence will be increasingly relying on information infrastructures, not only for management and control but also for monitoring outages and recovery. Combinations of wireless and ad hoc networks with fixed networks are becoming a reality in many domains.

Traditional solutions in dependable systems build in robustness at the production stage. Using redundancy, feedback mechanisms, and careful sensitivity analysis the system is shown to stay in its characterised operational profile and shows graceful degradation when components fail. In today's networked infrastructures it is more difficult to achieve these goals due to the following developments:

• New infrastructures are built as partial overlays with old infrastructures making the emerging system of systems irregular in its architecture.
• Introduction of new services, emerging trends and deregulation contribute to unbalancing phenomena: operational conditions may change abruptly creating traffic/flow patterns not foreseen by operators.
• Prevalence of software brings with it the weaknesses of COTS, making systems more susceptible to "normal" failures and malicious attempts to bring down a service.

Tomorrow's networked systems will have to face the challenge of survivability: delivering critical services in a timely manner in presence of overloads, attacks and failures.

In this workshop we intend to bring together research that addresses the above issues by incorporating metrics that represent the use of scarce resources, reflecting timing performance, anticipating outages and mobilising system reconfigurations to stall outages or recover from partial failures. Practical experience reports are highly encouraged. Papers that describe original unpublished work are solicited and selected papers will be published in a special issue of the International Journal on Critical Infrastructures (IJCIS). The topics of interest cover, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Models and architectures for network survivability
• Network fault-tolerance: wireless networks, sensor networks, IP networks
• Interoperability between hybrid wireline/wireless networks
• Fraud and intrusion Detection, Prediction, and Countermeasures
• Survivable architectures for e-commerce
• Security and availability of web services
• Support for QoS
• Adaptive systems theory and practice
• Quality metrics in open systems
• Availability/Performance trade-offs
• Security/Performance trade-offs
• Case studies and experimental studies