ABOUT THE PROJECT:
This project is developing methods for resilient, efficient recognition of distributed attacks on clouds, data warehouses, clusters, and other massively parallel systems. Such attacks cannot usually be detected through local monitoring alone. Specifically, we are developing a probabilistic distributed temporal logic for characterizing such attacks and methods of verifying formulas in such a logic. The novel approach of combining probabilistic, distributed, and temporal operators will yield a new representation for system properties. These operators will enable us to express more sophisticated attack patterns, as well as describe a wide variety of local and global properties, ranging from performance to availability.
Using distributed operators localizes the description and supplies the necessary scalability and performance. Probabilistic reasoning adds resilience against the uncertainty inherent in parallel systems. Temporal operators provide for history-awareness and anticipation of future events. The new semantics and associated algorithms we are researching will allow for reasoning about and proving of these properties. We will prototype a compiler that translates formulas into monitoring programs that can instantly be deployed in the network.