Maintaining Enterprise Resiliency Via Kaleidoscopic Adaption and Transformation of Software Services (MEERKATS)

This research investigates a new vision for increasing the resilience of computing clouds by elevating continuous change, evolution, and misinformation as first-rate design principles of the cloud's infrastructure. The work is motivated by the fact that today's clouds are very static, uniform, and predictable, allowing attackers who identify a vulnerability in one of the services or infrastructure components to spread their effect to other, mission-critical services. The goal is to integrate into clouds a new level of unpredictability for both their services and data so as to both impede an adversary's ability to achieve an initial system compromise and, if a compromise occurs, to detect, disrupt, and/or otherwise impede their ability to exploit this success.