CIRCADIA demonstration: active adaptive defense

Crucial information systems and infrastructure are always under attack. Furthermore, the automation of individual exploits for computer security attack now raises the specter of large-scale attacks that will occur too quickly for human defenders to react. To counter these high-speed, automated attacks, Honeywell Laboratories is developing a unique computer defense system that automatically and adaptively responds to net intruders. The Cooperative Intelligent Real-Time Control Architecture for Dynamic Information Assurance (CIRCADIA) will provide local, low-cost, autonomic defenses for computing resources by intelligently adapting threat monitoring systems and automatically responding to security threats in real time. Most importantly, CIRCADIA will use control-theoretic methods to automatically synthesize its control strategies, rather than relying on hand-built rules or other knowledge. CIRCADIA is built on the foundation of the CIRCA architecture for intelligent realtime control systems. CIRCA automatically synthesizes and executes hard-real-time discrete event control systems for embedded applications. CIRCADIA can be thought of as a specialization of CIRCA, tailored to the computer security domain.