ARMOR: Active-Defense Resilient Mission-Oriented Secure Cloud Platform

The Active-Defense Resilient Mission-Oriented (ARMOR) Secure cloud platform provides significant competitive advantages in the defense against vulnerabilities and threats in distributed and cloud computing infrastructures. It achieves this by endowing a traditional infrastructure with a collaborative security layer of active transparent defense and control, a cloud"immune system"which transparently introspects, monitors and controls the traditional cloud servers at runtime and can strongly react and immediately present a united defense across the entire cloud. The immune system is comprised of isolated (i.e., out-of-band) hardware which has its own control network. This separate conduit enables it to instantly share critical information and react independently enabling meaningful operation and fast recovery even in the case of sustained attacks and severe compromise. Ultimately, ARMOR technology significantly reduces the effectiveness of security threats in infrastructures running critical applications, through active defense mechanisms such as real-time monitoring of host activity, transparent introspective control and recovery of compromised hosts, and immediate reactivity in cross-cloud collaborative network and host-level defense. The physical protection assurances of ARMOR allows for safe deployment with full privacy in untrusted environments such as battle-field and commercial hosting scenarios. DOD can now outsource the infrastructure itself, thereby maximizing operational efficiency and capabilities.