A Unified Framework for the Analysis of Availability, Reliability and Security, With Applications to Quantum Networks

Abstract

Major goals of system security comprise confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and reliability. All of these have seen comprehensive treatment, yielding a vast collection of solutions. Information-theoretic security regarding confidentiality has seen considerable progress recently with the development of commercial quantum cryptographic devices. Solutions for perfectly secure authentication have been around much longer. Achieving perfect security, high availability and reliability, calls for combinations of various approaches. In this study, we propose a simple and uniform framework for the assessment of security, availability, and reliability that arbitrary compositions of security measures can provide. Our methodology facilitates system modeling in a decision-theoretic manner, which makes the models easily understandable even for specialists from fields other than security. At the same time, the models allow for strong assertions and for simple characterizations of the achievable security and safety in a system. We demonstrate the applicability of our results using quantum networks as an example.