Multi-model run-time security analysis - January 2016

Public Audience
Purpose: To highlight progress. Information is generally at a higher level which is accessible to the interested public.

PI(s): Jurgen Pfeffer
Co-PI(s): David Garlan, Bradley Schmerl

1) HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED (with short descriptions)

• Composability through multiple semantic models (here, architectural, organizational, and behavioral), which provide separation of concerns, while supporting synergistic benefits through integrated analyses.
• Scalability to large complex distributed systems using architectural models.
• Resilient architectures through the use of adaptive models that can be used at run-time to predict, detect and repair security attacks.
• Predictive security metrics by adapting social network-based metrics to the problem of architecture-level anomaly detection.

2) PUBLICATIONS

N/A

3) KEY HIGHLIGHTS

We have developed software that generates large scale architectures from (in the order of a thousand software elements) from descriptions of architectures styles. We have applied this to a description of cloud-based amazon web service systems. This can be used as the basis of simulations for insider threat scenarios to test analysis of large scale systems.