After successful completion of the course, students are able to...

...be prepared for the emerging challenges in computing systems supporting many critical operations of modern societies, including: mission-critical data centers; utility infrastructures; autonomous vehicles in land, air and space; fintech and blockchain; digital health.
Concrete competences acquired are: theory including fundamental paradigms and architectures; knowledge of techniques and tools for the design and development of resilient systems and of their components; and, finally, practical knowledge and experience in the application of the paradigms and tools in diverse situations and execution environments, from networked embedded systems to large-scale web systems. The syllabus of this curricular unit contributes both to the objectives of the unit as well as to the program objectives.

Due to COVID-19 this course needs to be cancelled. Postponing the course to a later semester is currently being investigated. Further information will be announced in due time.

****************************************

The lecturer of this course will be Prof. Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo / University of Luxembourg.

Description:

1. Review of fundamental security and dependability concepts
2. Fault and Intrusion Tolerance (FIT) concepts and terminology
3. FIT frameworks and mechanisms
4. Fault and Intrusion Tolerance strategies
5. Modeling faults
6. Architecting fault-and-intrusion-tolerant systems
7. Tolerating Intrusions
8. Resisting Persistent and Evolving Threats
9. Testing Attacks

This advanced course exposes students to the problem of resilient computing, showing that it lies on the fusion between dependability and security research, or understanding the need to simultaneously fight against cyber-attacks, accidental faults, design errors, and unexpected operating conditions, in an automatic and persistent way. We study dependability and security of computer systems and communication networks --- with a slant toward distributed systems --- and solutions under the tolerance paradigm, under the allowed presence of accidental and malicious threats (faults, vulnerabilities, attacks and intrusions). Furthermore, we study how to build on that, in order to make these properties sustainable over time, under persistent and/or evolving threat scenarios.

Classes are organized in the following manner: Lecture classes.
- Lecture classes aim at exposing the course matters. They guide the flow of subjects, which the student has to pursue in the textbook and deepen through the reading of complementary text book excerpts, as well as papers, manuals and annotations.

This is a visiting professor course of the Vienna PhD School of Informatics.

Schedule: The course will be held in blocked form from May 25 - 29, 2020.

Final exam.

Please register in TISS.

Main Bibliography:

Recommended readings will form the thread of the course explanation, consolidated by complementary readings by the students to get deep insight on several aspects of the matters.
- Intrusion-Tolerant Architectures: Concepts and Design. P. Veríssimo, N. Neves, and M. Correia. An extended version of the paper in: Architecting Dependable Systems. R. Lemos, C. Gacek, A. Romanovsky (eds.), Springer-Verlag LNCS 2677 (2003). Technical Report DI/FCUL TR03-5, Department of Informatics, University of Lisboa (2003).
- Intrusion-Resilient Middleware Design and Validation. P. Verissimo, M. Correia, N. Neves, P. Sousa. In Annals of Emerging Research in Information Assurance, Security and Privacy Services, H. Rao and S. Upadhyaya (Eds.), Elsevier 2008.
- Complemented by additional research and design papers, available from the course web.

Introductory Computer Security and Dependability courses advised, and it is expected that students have at least introductory notions of: computational systems and computer networks; operating systems and distributed systems.