The paper “OS diversity for intrusion tolerance: Myth or reality?” co-authored by Alysson Bessani, Nuno Neves and LASIGE’s (at the time) MSc student Miguel Garcia Henriques, and published at DSN-2011, was one of the two papers selected this year for the DSN-2021 Test-of-Time Award. The paper was also co-authored by Ilir Gashi (City, University of London) and Rafael Obelheiro (Santa Catarina State University).

The IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) Test-of-Time Award was instituted in 2019 to recognize two papers published in the previous 10-12 years, at the conference in the regular paper category, that have had a sustained and important impact on the theory and/or practice of dependable systems and networks computing research.

In the paper, the authors present a strong indication that building a system with diverse operating systems (OS) may be a useful technique to improve its intrusion tolerance capabilities. The researchers analysed the vulnerability data of 11 different OSes over a period of roughly 15 years from the NIST National Vulnerability Database. The paper is available here.