Evaluating Self-Adaptive Authorisation Infrastructures Through Gamification

Abstract

Self-adaptive systems are able to modify their behaviour and/or structure in response to changes that occur to the system itself, its environment, or even its goals. In terms of authorisation infrastructures, self-adaptation has been shown to provide runtime capabilities for specifying and enforcing access control policies and subject access privileges, with a goal to mitigate insider threat. The evaluation of self-adaptive authorisation infrastructures, particularly, in the context of insider threats, is challenging because simulation of malicious behaviour can only demonstrate a fraction of the types of abuse that is representative of the real-world. In this paper, we present an innovative approach based on an ethical game of hacking, protected by an authorisation infrastructure. A key feature of the approach is the ability to observe user activity pre- and post-adaptation when evaluating runtime consequences of self-adaptation. Our live experiments captured a wide range of unpredictable changes, including malicious behaviour related to the exploitation of known vulnerabilities. As an outcome, we demonstrated the ability of our self-adaptive authorisation infrastructure to handle malicious behaviour given the existence of real and intelligent users, in addition to capturing how users responded to adaptation.