Heterogeneous networking

Yongguang Zhang, Harrick Vin, Lorenzo Alvisi, Wenke Lee, Son K. Dao
2001 Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on New security paradigms - NSPW '01  
We believe that a network, to be survivable, must be heterogeneous. Just like a species that draws on a small gene pool can succumb to a single environmental threat, so a homogeneous network is vulnerable to a malicious attack that exploits a single weakness common to all of its components. In contrast, in a network in which each critical functionality is provided by a diverse set of protocols and implementations, attacks that focus on a weakness of one such protocol or implementation will not
more » ... e able to bring down the entire network, even though all elements are not be bulletproof and even if some of components are compromised. Following this survivability through heterogeneity philosophy, we propose a new survivability paradigm, called heterogeneous networking, for improving a network's defense capabilities. Rather than following the current trend of converging towards single solutions to provide the desired functionality at every element of the network architecture, this methodology calls for systematically increasing the network's heterogeneity without sacrificing its interoperability.
doi:10.1145/508171.508177 dblp:conf/nspw/ZhangVALD01 fatcat:kwb2avrobbhplb5wri5enbpzoi