Infrastructure: A Prerequisite for Effective Security

The CERT Coordination Center is building an experimental information infrastructure management system, SAFARI, capable of supporting a variety of operating systems and applications. The motivation behind this prototype is to demonstrate the security benefits of a systematically managed infrastructure. SAFARI is an attempt to improve the scalability of managing an infrastructure composed of many hosts, where there are many more hosts than hosts types. SAFARI is designed with one overarching principle: it should impact user, developer, and administrator activities as little as possible. The CERT Coordination Center is actively seeking partners to further this or alternative approaches to improving the infrastructural fabric on which Internet sites operate. SAFARI is currently being used by the CERT/CC to manage over 900 collections of software on three different versions of UNIX on three hardware platforms in a repository (/afs/cert.org/software) that is over 20 GB in size.