Cyberdiversity: Measures and Initial Results

Cyberdiversity is a concept borrowed from biology and refers to the introduction of diversity into the different levels of a computer. This kind of diversity is used to avert attacks that can threat a large number of systems that share common characteristics and as a result common vulnerabilities. Currently, there are many methods that introduce cyberdiversity into systems but there is no attempt to measure the existing cyberdiversity. In this paper we introduce a novel approach that measures the existing diversity in software. To accomplish that, we specify three different metrics. The concept of our approach is to collect specific information and then process it in order to find distinct similarities or differences within software. To test our approach, we implemented a system, based on the client-server architecture.