6th workshop on recent advances in intrusion tolerance and reSilience (WRAITS 2012)

Now entering its sixth consecutive year, the last four being in conjunction with DSN, the primary theme of WRAITS is “intrusion tolerance” (IT for short). IT starts with the premise that software-based components will always contain bugs and misconfigurations that can be discovered, exposed and enabled by the increasingly new ways in which distributed and networked computer systems are being created today. IT acknowledges that it is impossible to completely prevent intrusions and attacks, and it is often impossible to accurately detect the act of intrusion and stop it early enough. Intrusion tolerant systems therefore must have the means to continue to operate correctly despite attacks and intrusions, and deny the attacker/intruder the success they seek as much as possible. For instance, an intrusion tolerant system may suffer loss of service or resources due to the attack but it may continue to provide critical services in a degraded mode or trigger automatic mechanisms to regain and recover the compromised services and resources. Other descriptions used for similar themed research include Survivability, Resilience, Trustworthy Systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, and Autonomic Self-Healing Systems. Indeed, this year's workshop has been slightly renamed from its predecessors (by also including “reSilience” in the title) to explicitly underscore the breadth of the topics involved.