Characterizing Self-Healing Software Systems

The introduction of self-healing capabilities to software systems could offer a way to alter the current, unfavorable imbalance in the software security arms race. Consequently, self-healing software systems have emerged as a research area of particular interest in recent years. Motivated by the inability of traditional techniques to guarantee software integrity and availability, especially against motivated human adversaries, self-healing approaches are meant to complement existing approaches to security. In this paper, we provide a first attempt to characterize self-healing software systems by surveying some of the existing work in the field. We focus on systems that effect structural changes to the software under protection, as opposed to blocklevel system reconfiguration. Our goal is to begin mapping the space of software self-healing capabilities. We believe this to be a necessary first step in exploring the boundaries of the research space and understanding the possibilities that such systems enable, as well as determining the risks and limitations inherent in automatic-reaction schemes.