IT Monoculture Security Risks and Defenses

An IT monoculture occurs when a large fraction of the computers in computational ecosystem run the same software. By automatically creating diversity, the risks of deploying an IT monoculture are reduced so that it becomes difficult for a single malware vector to wreck havoc. Two of the articles in this collection discuss techniques to create this diversity; a third article explores the risks of monocultures in the likely context of threats that are known or might be anticipated today.