Analysis and Simulation of System Survivability

Survivability represents an important property of an information system which must withstand devastating malicious attacks and system failures, as well as continuously provide essential services to users. In this paper, we qualitatively analyze a system´s states under different levels of attacks with varying system recovery abilities. Then, we use Colored Petri Net tools to simulate and measure the degree of survivability given a set of attack-recovery scenarios. The analysis and simulation models provide useful guidelines for system administrators to identify the system´s survivability under given attack and recovery processes and the technical mechanisms in order to improve the system´s survivability. To better explain our models, we use a wireless ad hoc sensor network (WASN) as an illustrative example throughout the paper, although our approaches can be applied to other similar types of systems.