VMCIS: A Cognitive Immune System for Virtual Machine-based Mission Critical Applications

Cyber systems remain susceptible to attack and compromise despite the best security efforts. There are two growing trends in the research community to address this: a paradigm of prioritizing missions over individual network resources, and a push for resilient systems capable of fighting through cyber attacks. ATC-NY will develop VMCIS, the Virtual Machine Cognitive Immune System, which combines both approaches. VMCIS constantly monitors systems at many execution levels and automatically takes corrective actions when necessary. VMCIS reasons about system state using a probabilistic, hierarchical logic engine that is built around a model of mission-success. It directs corrective actions using a System Controller that can manipulate both the hypervisor to checkpoint, rollback, and migrate VMs, and the operating system to install, remove, restart, or kill applications. VMCIS also provides APIs so developers can add customized instrumentation and remediation actions.