8 research outputs found
Enhancing secure Tropos to effectively deal with security requirements in the development of multiagent systems
The consideration of security requirements in the development of multi-agent systems is a very difficult task. However, only few approaches have been proposed that try to integrate security issues as internal part of the development process. Amongst them, secure Tropos has been proposed as a structured approach towards the consideration of security issues in the development of multiagent systems. In this paper we enhance secure Tropos by integrating to its stages: (i) a process for selecting amongst alternative architectural styles using as criteria the security requirements of the system; (ii) a pattern-based approach to transform security requirements to design, and (iii) a security attack scenarios approach to test the developed solution. The electronic single assessment process (eSAP) case study is used to illustrate our approach
Modelling Requirements for Content Recommendation Systems
This paper addresses the modelling of requirements for a content
Recommendation System (RS) for Online Social Networks (OSNs). On OSNs, a user
switches roles constantly between content generator and content receiver. The
goals and softgoals are different when the user is generating a post, as
opposed as replying to a post. In other words, the user is generating instances
of different entities, depending on the role she has: a generator generates
instances of a "post", while the receiver generates instances of a "reply".
Therefore, we believe that when addressing Requirements Engineering (RE) for
RS, it is necessary to distinguish these roles clearly.
We aim to model an essential dynamic on OSN, namely that when a user creates
(posts) content, other users can ignore that content, or themselves start
generating new content in reply, or react to the initial posting. This dynamic
is key to designing OSNs, because it influences how active users are, and how
attractive the OSN is for existing, and to new users. We apply a well-known
Goal Oriented RE (GORE) technique, namely i-star, and show that this language
fails to capture this dynamic, and thus cannot be used alone to model the
problem domain. Hence, in order to represent this dynamic, its relationships to
other OSNs' requirements, and to capture all relevant information, we suggest
using another modelling language, namely Petri Nets, on top of i-star for the
modelling of the problem domain. We use Petri Nets because it is a tool that is
used to simulate the dynamic and concurrent activities of a system and can be
used by both practitioners and theoreticians.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure
Managing Social Engineering Attacks- Considering Human Factors and Security Investment
Soliciting and managing the protection of information assets has become a objective of
paramount importance in an organizational context. Information Security Management System
(ISMS) has the unique role of ensuring that adequate and appropriate security tools are in
place in order to protect information assets. Security is always seen in three dimensions of
technology, organization, and people. Undoubtedly, the socio-technical challenges have
proven to be the most difficult ones to tackle. Social Engineering Attacks (SEAs) are a sociotechnical
challenge and considerably increase security risks by seeking access to information
assets by exploiting the vulnerabilities in organizations as they target human frailties. Dealing
effectively and adequately with SEAs requires practical security benchmarking together with
control mechanism tools, which in turn requires investment to support security and ultimately
organizational goals. This paper contributes in this area. In particular, the paper proposes a
language for managing SEAs using several concepts such as actor, risks, goals, security
investment and vulnerabilities. The language supports in-depth investigation of human factors
as one of the main causes of SEAs. It also assists in the selection of appropriate mechanisms
considering security investment to mitigate risks. Finally, the paper uses a real incident in a
financial institution to demonstrate the applicability of the approach
Agile Changes of Security Landscape: A Human Factors and Security Investment View
The information security experts are finding it challenging to timely response the emerging
threats. The rapid changing of security landscape and dependency on the agile software and
system development projects make it challenging to address these threats in a real time. This
could create potential risks to the overall business continuity. Furthermore, critical human
factors, cost and investment in the information security field will add more anxiety in dealing
with risks in an agile environment. There is a need for a unified approach to address the
principles of information security, human factors and security investment in an agile
environment. This paper provides a solution for constructing an effective information security
system by taking into consideration an adequate risk assessment and controls, considering
critical human factors and security investment within agile changes of security landscape. A
list of concepts is considered for the purpose of an effective information security system. The
paper also includes a short review of existing knowledge on the topics of agile development
and information security
A Goal and Ontology Based Approach for Generating ETL Process Specifications
Data warehouse (DW) systems development involves several tasks such as defining requirements, designing DW schemas, and specifying data transformation operations. Indeed, the success of DW systems is very much dependent on the proper design of the extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) processes. However, the common design-related problems in the ETL processes such as defining user requirements and data transformation specifications are far from being resolved. These problems are due to data heterogeneity in data sources, ambiguity of user requirements, and the complexity of data transformation activities. Current approaches have limitations on the reconciliation of DW requirement semantics towards designing the ETL processes. As a result, this has prolonged the process of the ETL processes specifications generation. The semantic framework of DW systems established from this study is used to develop the requirement analysis method for designing the ETL processes (RAMEPs) from the different perspectives of organization, decision-maker, and developer by using goal and ontology approaches. The correctness of RAMEPs approach was validated by using modified and newly developed compliant tools. The RAMEPs was evaluated in three real case studies, i.e., Student Affairs System, Gas Utility System, and Graduate Entrepreneur System. These case studies were used to illustrate how the RAMEPs approach can be implemented for designing and generating the ETL processes specifications. Moreover, the RAMEPs approach was reviewed by the DW experts for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of this method, and the new approach is accepted. The RAMEPs method proves that the ETL processes specifications can be derived from the early phases of DW systems development by using the goal-ontology approach
Securing open multi-agent systems governed by electronic institutions
One way to build large-scale autonomous systems is to develop an open multi-agent system
using peer-to-peer architectures in which agents are not pre-engineered to work together and in
which agents themselves determine the social norms that govern collective behaviour. The social
norms and the agent interaction models can be described by Electronic Institutions such as those
expressed in the Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC), a compact executable specification
language based on logic programming and pi-calculus. Open multi-agent systems have
experienced growing popularity in the multi-agent community and are expected to have many
applications in the near future as large scale distributed systems become more widespread, e.g.
in emergency response, electronic commerce and cloud computing. A major practical limitation
to such systems is security, because the very openness of such systems opens the doors to
adversaries for exploit existing vulnerabilities.
This thesis addresses the security of open multi-agent systems governed by electronic
institutions. First, the main forms of attack on open multi-agent systems are introduced and
classified in the proposed attack taxonomy. Then, various security techniques from the literature
are surveyed and analysed. These techniques are categorised as either prevention or detection
approaches. Appropriate countermeasures to each class of attack are also suggested.
A fundamental limitation of conventional security mechanisms (e.g. access control and
encryption) is the inability to prevent information from being propagated. Focusing on
information leakage in choreography systems using LCC, we then suggest two frameworks to
detect insecure information flows: conceptual modeling of interaction models and language-based
information flow analysis. A novel security-typed LCC language is proposed to address
the latter approach.
Both static (design-time) and dynamic (run-time) security type checking are employed to
guarantee no information leakage can occur in annotated LCC interaction models. The proposed
security type system is then formally evaluated by proving its properties. A limitation of both
conceptual modeling and language-based frameworks is difficulty of formalising realistic
policies using annotations.
Finally, the proposed security-typed LCC is applied to a cloud computing configuration case
study, in which virtual machine migration is managed. The secrecy of LCC interaction models
for virtual machine management is analysed and information leaks are discussed
A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems
Multi-agent systems have attracted the attention of researchers because of agents' automatic, pro-active, and dynamic problem solving behaviors. Consequently, there has been a rapid development in agent technology which has enabled us to provide or receive useful and convenient services in a variety of areas such as banking, transportation, e-business, and healthcare. In many of these services, it is, however, necessary that security is guaranteed. Unless we guarantee the security services based on agent-based systems, these services will face significant deployment problems. In this paper, we survey existing work related to security in multi-agent systems, especially focused on access control and trust/reputation, and then present our analyses. We also present existing problems and discuss future research challenges. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V 2011