Computer and network performance: Graduating from the “Age of Innocence”

Performance analysis has been used for over half a century for the design and operations of computer systems and communications networks. This methodology, mostly stochastic in nature, has been based on the underlying paradigm that users are innocent and “well behaving”. Following the flourish of the internet and the subsequent rise of malicious incidents, research started investigating the effect of malicious attacks aimed at degrading system performance.The objective of this work is to understand how system performance is affected by malicious behavior and how performance evaluation should account for it. We do so by considering an array of “classical” systems taken from the literature and examining their degree of vulnerability. These can also serve in providing some initial insights into what makes a system design vulnerable or resilient.