An efficient recovery and survival scheme against malware attacks

Intricate malware can result in the failure of on-line Comprehensive Protection (CP) in distributed systems, and place the system in an unsafe state which is difficult to recover from. There lacks an effective scheme to defend against this extreme attack. In this paper, based on the Two-layer Protection and Cooperative Recovery (TPCRS) mechanism, we propose an efficient survivable scheme against malware attacks in distributed systems. The basic strategy is to deploy an Emergency Response/Recovery (ER) agent at each node to recognize the state of the system whenever the CP fails, and to carry out cooperative security among multiple nodes so that the infected nodes can be rapidly recovered. Furthermore, a Preventive Maintenance (PM) model is adopted to enhance the reliability of the distributed system. Simulation results demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of the proposed schemes.