Automata models of fault propagation and self-healing

The papers devoted to information security analysis often discuss the damage caused by attacks on computer systems and information resources but little attention is paid to how hostile attacks and their failures affect business processes and create serious threats to the activities of business systems as a whole. The idea of terrorists — low impact entails great damage — is the main goal of hostile influence on the business system. While studying the problems of the propagation of failures and hostile impacts, dependencies in the business system and cause and effect relationships play the basic role. Finite automaton has been selected to simulate the interaction processes of the business system's subsystems. A mechanism for recovering the subsystem from a failure has been built. In the causal scheme, a failure propagation model is built in the presence of a mechanism for recovering each automaton after the failure. It is shown that despite the rapid recovery from a failure for each subsystem of a large system, a global failure may occur due to out-of-sync or due to the appearance of too many queues at critical controls.