A Contract-based Event Driven Model for Collaborative Security in Financial Information Systems

This paper introduces a new collaboration abstraction, called Semantic Room (SR), specifically targeted to facilitating sharing and processing large volumes of data produced and consumed in real time by a collection of networked participants. The model enables constructing flexible collaborative event-driven distributed systems with well-defined and contractually regulated properties and behavior. The contract determines the set of services provided by SR, the software and hardware resources required for its operation along with a collection of non-functional requirements, such as, data protection, isolation, trust, security, availability, fault-tolerance, and performance. We show how the SR model can be leveraged for creating trusted information processing systems for the sake of protecting financial institutions against coordinated security threats (e.g., stealthy scans, worm outbreaks, Distributed Denial of Service). To this end, we present several use-cases demonstrating a variety of the SR administration task flows, and discuss possible ways of implementing the SR abstraction using the collaborative intrusion detection as an example.