IT-SECX 2019 | Johanna Ullrich: Monocultures and Diversity in IT

Monocultures and Diversity in IT Johanna Ullrich | SBA Research If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. This is true for domestic woods and IT infrastructures alike. Just like a bug destroying acres of spruce forests, a single vulnerability (or isolated error) impacts vast amounts of devices. As these vulnerabilities have the potential to eventually cause the outage of Internet core functionality or even critical infrastructures, we are obliged to join forces to increase diversity at all layers. In this presentation, we explore practical reasons leading to large IT monocultures and their consequences using the example of past vulnerabilities and current research. We discuss how diversity increases the resilience of IT infrastructures, present available approaches and their fit with current practices, eventually outlining a diversity model inherent to IT. Finally, we discuss how everyone of us is able to leverage diversity.