Model-Based Vulnerability Assessment of Self-Adaptive Protection Systems

Security mechanisms are at the base of modern computer systems, demanded to be more and more reactive to changing environments and malicious intentions. Security policies unable to change in time are destined to be exploited and thus, system security compromised. However, the ability to properly change security policies is only possible once the most effective mechanism to adopt under specific conditions is known. This paper proposes a model-based approach to accomplish this goal: a vulnerability model of the system is built by means of a modelbased, layered security approach, and used to quantitatively evaluate the best protection mechanism at a given time and hence, to adapt the system to changing environments. The evaluation relies on the use of a powerful, flexible formalism such as Dynamic Bayesian Networks.