Biblio

This paper is a systemization of knowledge of autonomic cybersecurity. Disruptive technologies, such as IoT, AI and autonomous systems, are becoming more prevalent and often have little or no cybersecurity protections. This lack of security is contributing to the expanding cybersecurity attack surface. The autonomic computing initiative was started to address the complexity of administering complex computing systems by making them self-managing. Autonomic systems contain attributes to address cyberattacks, such as self-protecting and self-healing that can secure new technologies. There has been a number of research projects on autonomic cybersecurity, with different approaches and target technologies, many of them disruptive. This paper reviews autonomic computing, analyzes research on autonomic cybersecurity, and provides a systemization of knowledge of the research. The paper concludes with identification of gaps in autonomic cybersecurity for future research.

Autonomic resource management for distributed edge computing systems provides an effective means of enabling dynamic placement and adaptation in the face of network changes, load dynamics, and failures. However, adaptation in-and-of-itself offers a side channel by which malicious entities can extract valuable information. An attacker can take advantage of autonomic resource management techniques to fool a system into misallocating resources and crippling applications. Using a few scenarios, we outline how attacks can be launched using partial knowledge of the resource management substrate - with as little as a single compromised node. We argue that any system that provides adaptation must consider resource management as an attack surface. As such, we propose ADAPT2, a framework that incorporates concepts taken from Moving-Target Defense and state estimation techniques to ensure correctness and obfuscate resource management, thereby protecting valuable system and application information from leaking.

National assets such as transportation networks, large manufacturing, business and health facilities, power generation, and distribution networks are critical infrastructures. The cyber threats to these infrastructures have increasingly become more sophisticated, extensive and numerous. Cyber security conventional measures have proved useful in the past but increasing sophistication of attacks dictates the need for newer measures. The autonomic computing paradigm mimics the autonomic nervous system and is promising to meet the latest challenges in the cyber threat landscape. This paper provides a brief review of autonomic computing applications for SCADA systems and proposes architecture for cyber security.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will connect not only computers and mobile devices, but it will also interconnect smart buildings, houses, and cities, as well as electrical grids, gas plants, and water networks, automobiles, airplanes, etc. IoT will lead to the development of a wide range of advanced information services that are pervasive, cost-effective, and can be accessed from anywhere and at any time. However, due to the exponential number of interconnected devices, cyber-security in the IoT is a major challenge. It heavily relies on the digital identity concept to build security mechanisms such as authentication and authorization. Current centralized identity management systems are built around third party identity providers, which raise privacy concerns and present a single point of failure. In addition, IoT unconventional characteristics such as scalability, heterogeneity and mobility require new identity management systems to operate in distributed and trustless environments, and uniquely identify a particular device based on its intrinsic digital properties and its relation to its human owner. In order to deal with these challenges, we present a Blockchain-based Identity Framework for IoT (BIFIT). We show how to apply our BIFIT to IoT smart homes to achieve identity self-management by end users. In the context of smart home, the framework autonomously extracts appliances signatures and creates blockchain-based identifies for their appliance owners. It also correlates appliances signatures (low level identities) and owners identifies in order to use them in authentication credentials and to make sure that any IoT entity is behaving normally.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects not only computers and mobile devices, but it also interconnects smart buildings, homes, and cities, as well as electrical grids, gas, and water networks, automobiles, airplanes, etc. However, IoT applications introduce grand security challenges due to the increase in the attack surface. Current security approaches do not handle cybersecurity from a holistic point of view; hence a systematic cybersecurity mechanism needs to be adopted when designing IoTbased applications. In this work, we present a risk management framework to deploy secure IoT-based applications for Smart Infrastructures at the design time and the runtime. At the design time, we propose a risk management method that is appropriate for smart infrastructures. At the design time, our framework relies on the Anomaly Behavior Analysis (ABA) methodology enabled by the Autonomic Computing paradigm and an intrusion detection system to detect any threat that can compromise IoT infrastructures by. Our preliminary experimental results show that our framework can be used to detect threats and protect IoT premises and services.

The popularity of Cloud computing has considerably increased during the last years. The increase of Cloud users and their interactions with the Cloud infrastructure raise the risk of resources faults. Such a problem can lead to a bad reputation of the Cloud environment which slows down the evolution of this technology. To address this issue, the dynamic and the complex architecture of the Cloud should be taken into account. Indeed, this architecture requires that resources protection and healing must be transparent and without external intervention. Unlike previous work, we suggest integrating the fundamental aspects of autonomic computing in the Cloud to deal with the self-healing of Cloud resources. Starting from the high degree of match between autonomic computing systems and multiagent systems, we propose to take advantage from the autonomous behaviour of agent technology to create an intelligent Cloud that supports autonomic aspects. Our proposed solution is a multi-agent system which interacts with the Cloud infrastructure to analyze the resources state and execute Checkpoint/Replication strategy or migration technique to solve the problem of failed resources.

In the modern retailing industry, many enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are considered legacy software systems that have become too expensive to replace and too costly to re-engineer. Countering the need to maintain and extend the business value of these systems is the need to do so in the simplest, cheapest, and least risky manner available. There are a number of approaches used by software engineers to mitigate the negative impact of evolving a legacy systems, including leveraging service-oriented architecture to automate manual tasks previously performed by humans. A relatively recent approach in software engineering focuses upon implementing self-managing attributes, or “autonomic” behavior in software applications and systems of applications in order to reduce or eliminate the need for human monitoring and intervention. Entire systems can be autonomic or they can be hybrid systems that implement one or more autonomic components to communicate with external systems. In this paper, we describe a commercial development project in which a legacy multi-channel commerce enterprise resource planning system was extended with service-oriented architecture an autonomic control loop design to communicate with an external third-party security screening provider. The goal was to reduce the cost of the human labor necessary to screen an ever-increasing volume of orders and to reduce the potential for human error in the screening process. The solution automated what was previously an inefficient, incomplete, and potentially error-prone manual process by inserting a new autonomic software component into the existing order fulfillment workflow.

Computing systems and networks become increasingly large and complex with a variety of compromises and vulnerabilities. The network security and privacy are of great concern today, where self-defense against different kinds of attacks in an autonomous and holistic manner is a challenging topic. To address this problem, we developed an innovative technology called Bionic Autonomic Nervous System (BANS). The BANS is analogous to biological nervous system, which consists of basic modules like cyber axon, cyber neuron, peripheral nerve and central nerve. We also presented an innovative self-defense mechanism which utilizes the Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks, and Entropy Awareness, etc. Equipped with the BANS, computer and network systems can intelligently self-defend against both known and unknown compromises/attacks including denial of services (DoS), spyware, malware, and virus. BANS also enabled multiple computers to collaboratively fight against some distributed intelligent attacks like DDoS. We have implemented the BANS in practice. Some case studies and experimental results exhibited the effectiveness and efficiency of the BANS and the self-defense mechanism.

Self-protecting software systems are a class of autonomic systems capable of detecting and mitigating security threats at runtime. They are growing in importance, as the stovepipe static methods of securing software systems have been shown to be inadequate for the challenges posed by modern software systems. Self-protection, like other self-* properties, allows the system to adapt to the changing environment through autonomic means without much human intervention, and can thereby be responsive, agile, and cost effective. While existing research has made significant progress towards autonomic and adaptive security, gaps and challenges remain. This article presents a significant extension of our preliminary study in this area. In particular, unlike our preliminary study, here we have followed a systematic literature review process, which has broadened the scope of our study and strengthened the validity of our conclusions. By proposing and applying a comprehensive taxonomy to classify and characterize the state-of-the-art research in this area, we have identified key patterns, trends and challenges in the existing approaches, which reveals a number of opportunities that will shape the focus of future research efforts.

The proliferation of digital devices in a networked industrial ecosystem, along with an exponential growth in complexity and scope, has resulted in elevated security concerns and management complexity issues. This paper describes a novel architecture utilizing concepts of autonomic computing and a simple object access protocol (SOAP)-based interface to metadata access points (IF-MAP) external communication layer to create a network security sensor. This approach simplifies integration of legacy software and supports a secure, scalable, and self-managed framework. The contribution of this paper is twofold: 1) A flexible two-level communication layer based on autonomic computing and service oriented architecture is detailed and 2) three complementary modules that dynamically reconfigure in response to a changing environment are presented. One module utilizes clustering and fuzzy logic to monitor traffic for abnormal behavior. Another module passively monitors network traffic and deploys deceptive virtual network hosts. These components of the sensor system were implemented in C++ and PERL and utilize a common internal D-Bus communication mechanism. A proof of concept prototype was deployed on a mixed-use test network showing the possible real-world applicability. In testing, 45 of the 46 network attached devices were recognized and 10 of the 12 emulated devices were created with specific operating system and port configurations. In addition, the anomaly detection algorithm achieved a 99.9% recognition rate. All output from the modules were correctly distributed using the common communication structure.

The proliferation of digital devices in a networked industrial ecosystem, along with an exponential growth in complexity and scope, has resulted in elevated security concerns and management complexity issues. This paper describes a novel architecture utilizing concepts of autonomic computing and a simple object access protocol (SOAP)-based interface to metadata access points (IF-MAP) external communication layer to create a network security sensor. This approach simplifies integration of legacy software and supports a secure, scalable, and self-managed framework. The contribution of this paper is twofold: 1) A flexible two-level communication layer based on autonomic computing and service oriented architecture is detailed and 2) three complementary modules that dynamically reconfigure in response to a changing environment are presented. One module utilizes clustering and fuzzy logic to monitor traffic for abnormal behavior. Another module passively monitors network traffic and deploys deceptive virtual network hosts. These components of the sensor system were implemented in C++ and PERL and utilize a common internal D-Bus communication mechanism. A proof of concept prototype was deployed on a mixed-use test network showing the possible real-world applicability. In testing, 45 of the 46 network attached devices were recognized and 10 of the 12 emulated devices were created with specific operating system and port configurations. In addition, the anomaly detection algorithm achieved a 99.9% recognition rate. All output from the modules were correctly distributed using the common communication structure.

Future personal living environments feature an increasing number of convenience-, health- and security-related applications provided by distributed services, which do not only support users but require tasks such as installation, configuration and continuous administration. These tasks are becoming tiresome, complex and error-prone. One way to escape this situation is to enable service platforms to configure and manage themselves. The approach presented here extends services with semantic descriptions to enable platform-independent autonomous service level management using model driven architecture and autonomic computing concepts. It has been implemented as a OSGi-based semantic autonomic manager, whose concept, prototypical implementation and evaluation are presented.
 

Autonomic networks and services are exposed to a large variety of security risks. The vulnerability management process plays a crucial role for ensuring their safe configurations and preventing security attacks. We focus in this survey on the assessment of vulnerabilities in autonomic environments. In particular, we analyze current methods and techniques contributing to the discovery, the description and the detection of these vulnerabilities. We also point out important challenges that should be faced in order to fully integrate this process into the autonomic management plane.
 

An important step in achieving robustness to run-time faults is the ability to detect and repair problems when they arise in a running system. Effective fault detection and repair could be greatly enhanced by run-time fault diagnosis and localization, since it would allow the repair mechanisms to focus adaptation effort on the parts most in need of attention. In this paper we describe an approach to run-time fault diagnosis that combines architectural models with spectrum-based reasoning for multiple fault localization. Spectrum-based reasoning is a lightweight technique that takes a form of trace abstraction and produces a list (ordered by probability) of likely fault candidates. We show how this technique can be combined with architectural models to support run-time diagnosis that can (a) scale to modern distributed software systems; (b) accommodate the use of black-box components and proprietary infrastructure for which one has neither a specification nor source code; and (c) handle inherent uncertainty about the probable cause of a problem even in the face of transient faults and faults that arise only when certain combinations of system components interact.