Self-regenerative software components

Abstract

Self-regenerative capabilities are a new trend in survivable system design. Self-regeneration ensures the property that a system's vulnerabilities cannot be exploited to the extent that the mission objective is compromised, but instead that the vulnerabilities are eventually removed, and system functionality is restored. To establish the usefulness of self-regenerative capabilities in the design of survivable systems, it is important to ensure that a system satisfying the self-regenerative requirement is survivable, and software engineering practices and tool support are available for building self-regenerative systems. This paper emphasizes the need for formal definition of the concept of self-regenerative systems in general and self-regenerative software components in particular. We propose a simple formal definition of a self-regenerative software component and we propose to adapt well-established formal software validation techniques to build tool support to implement self-regenerative capabilities at the component level.