Understanding Effects of Norms and Policies on the Robustness, Liveness, and Resilience of Systems - July 2015

Public Audience
Purpose: To highlight project progress. Information is generally at a higher level which is accessible to the interested public. All information contained in the report (regions 1-3) is a Government Deliverable/CDRL.

PI(s):  Emily Berglund, Jon Doyle, Munindar Singh
Researchers:  Hongying Du, Bennett Y. Narron, Nirav Ajmeri

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED

• Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration - Norms provide a standard of correctness for collaborative behavior, with respect to which policies of the participants can be evaluated individually or in groups.
• Resilient Architectures - The study of robustness and resilience of systems modeled in terms of norms would provide a basis for understanding resilient social architectures.

PUBLICATIONS
 

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• We have developed a formal model of security-relevant interactions in sociotechnical systems. This model helps to capture assumptions regarding relationships between variables of interest. A motivation for a simulation study is to understand systems that cannot be fully understood analytically. To this end, a formal model can help suggest hypotheses and conditions to guide simulation studies. In addition, a formalization can guide an empirical evaluation of relationships among relevant variables in qualitative terms.
• We have begun to consider some of the possible ways in which we could empirically validate the assumptions of our model via human-subject studies.