Moving and Relocating: A Logical Framework of Service Migration for Software System Survivability

Given the increasing scale and complexity of cyberattacks, innovative techniques must be developed to effectively respond to intrusions and enable affected software systems to survive security incidents. In this paper, we present a logical framework to model a service migration for software system survivability. A formal logic has been developed for system activity specification in which (1) service migration is an effective mechanism that dynamically transfers critical services from a compromised platform to other clean, healthy platforms; and (2) important service characteristics (e.g., the service level and other temporal features) are preserved during and after a migration. The proposed framework provides means to represent and verify that a software system with the required properties satisfies a user´s policy in terms of the desired survivability objectives.