Making Intrusion Tolerance Accessible: A Cloud-Based Hybrid Management Approach to Deploying Resilient Systems

Even with the rise of cyberattacks on high-value systems, we still do not see widespread adoption of intrusion-tolerant replication protocols, despite their long history in the research community and potential to support the needed resiliency. A key barrier is that deploying and managing intrusion-tolerant systems in practice requires substantial investment in additional physical infrastructure, as well as specialized technical expertise. In this work, we address this gap by designing a hybrid management model: while the system operator manages their application, a service provider hosts and manages the intrusion-tolerant replication service using cloud infrastructure. We develop the protocols to support this system architecture, without revealing application state, algorithms, or client information to the cloud provider, even when application servers are compromised. We implement and evaluate our approach in the context of an industrial control system and show that it meets the system's performance and resilience requirements.