Dynamic Security Specification Through Autonomic Component Ensembles

Abstract

One of the key properties of autonomic component systems is their dynamicity and context-dependence of their behavior. In contrast to systems with a static architecture, their components interact and collaborate in an ad-hoc fashion depending on their internal state and location, the state of other components and their locations, timing and history of events/state of external (uncontrolled) environment. This high degree of dynamicity collides with traditional approaches to security, which typically rely on static hierarchies of roles and a static assignment of roles. To address this problem, we formulate security rules which are autonomically composable and context-dependent; in their evolution, they follow the dynamicity and context-dependence of the autonomic components. Based on our previous work with autonomic component ensembles, we show how ensembles can be exploited to define security rules to control interactions in a system of autonomic components.