Cyber Immunity

Our entire lives are bound up with gadgets, devices and a variety of smart systems. It’s hard to imagine the modern economy, for example, without a huge number of computers, office IT networks, industrial machines and automated control systems.

Most intelligent systems today are designed without security being considered a primary goal. The use of vulnerable software in cyber-physical systems, which are multiplying, creates a situation where cyberthreats increasingly endanger the safety of humans in the physical world. Kaspersky decided to change this: our specialists created a concept for designing IT systems with “innate” immunity.

We call this a Cyber Immune approach. Cyber Immunity can help create IT systems that are inherently secure and safe. An information system can be said to be immune when most types of cyberattacks directed at it prove ineffective and cannot impact the key functions envisioned during the design phase.

Cyber Immunity will ensure reliable and predictable operation of information systems by minimizing the risks of cyber incidents and related accidents. The concept of Cyber Immunity implies that the risk of entire classes of cyberattacks will be eliminated: they can no longer affect a system’s ability to execute its functions.

The benefits of Cyber Immunity solutions for IT infrastructures with high information security requirements (heavy industry, transportation, energy supplies, etc.) are inextricably linked with the technologies at the heart of KasperskyOS.

Building Cyber Immune solutions based on KasperskyOS provides important advantages to developers:

To achieve the Cyber Immunity of solutions based on KasperskyOS, it is necessary to follow a special methodology created by Kaspersky.

A system created in accordance with the Cyber Immunity principles provides:

• the description of its security goals and assumptions;
• the means to ensure the isolation of the security domains and the independent control of all interactions among them;
• the guarantees of accomplishing the security goals in all possible scenarios of using the system considering the described assumptions (except if the trusted computing base of the solution is compromised);
• the assurances of reliability of the solution’s whole trusted computing base which are corresponding to its security class.

To provide the system with Cyber Immunity, the developers have to consider the following:

• which parameters must have guaranteed protection;
• under what conditions and with what provisos will the system be used.