Network Science and Intelligent Systems - Wireless Communications and Information Networks: Security Policy Migrants in Dynamic Collaborative IT Environments
Abstract
There have been technological developments such as cloud computing and virtualization that have facilitated the view of IT infrastructure as a common-pool of resources. Sharing resources makes economic sense and it is a management paradigm that can be useful not only in centralized environments like cloud centers, but also among resources at the edge of the network or among mobile and sensor devices. Vehicular micro-cloud computing and coalition operations are examples of such scenarios. In these environments the computational resources are heterogeneous, the number can vary over time and there might not be previous knowledge of the schedule of availability. The resources can be data, software or hardware. One of the management challenges in these environments is how to provide the appropriate confidentiality, integrity and availability of the shared resources in spite of the fact that resources can be moved around. A tunable security on a par with the elasticity expected from these federated systems will be tantamount to their widespread deployment. Hence, in this project, we are interested in addressing the following question: given a security policy that is being enforced in a particular source computational device, what does it entail to migrate this policy to be enforced in a different target device? Because of the differences between the devices and because these devices cannot be seen in isolation but in the context where they are deployed, the meaning of the policy enforced in the source device needs to be re-interpreted and implemented in the context of the target device. The aim of the project is to develop migration procedures and a formal framework to evaluate the appropriateness of the migration. The framework will be developed based on the observation that many security policies can be described as safety properties of the (possibly infinite) execution traces of a system. Informally, a safety property identifies and stipulates that a Óbad thingÓ doesnÕt happen during the execution and only those execution traces where bad things donÕt happen comply with the policy. The mathematical formalization could, for example, distinguish between policies that cannot be implemented because the enforcement mechanisms in the target device are limited versus devices that are unable to get to the values of parameters required to enforce the policy. It could also identify a policy implementation in a device that is stricter than the source policy, meaning that all the executions that were not allowed by the intended policy are not allowed by the implementation but some compliant executions might be rejected by the implementation. There might also be less cautious implementation that let a few policy violations pass to ensure the system is always available to correct executions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 19, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1910432
Entities
People
- Alessandra Russo
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Imperial College London
- United States Army