Reliable mission deployment in vulnerable distributed systems

Recent years have seen a growing interest in mission-centric operation of large-scale distributed systems. However, due to their complexity, these systems are prone to failures and vulnerable to a wide range of cyber-attacks. Current solutions focus either on the infrastructure itself or on mission analysis, but fail to consider information about the complex interdependencies existing between system components and mission tasks. In this paper, we take a different approach, and present a solution for deploying mission tasks in a distributed computing environment in a way that minimizes a mission's exposure to vulnerabilities by taking into account available information about vulnerabilities and dependencies. We model the mission deployment problem as a task allocation problem, subject to various dependability constraints. The proposed solution is based on the A* algorithm for searching the solution space, but we also introduce a heuristic to significantly improve the search performance. We validate our approach, and show that our algorithm scales linearly with the size of both missions and networks.