Design of an Adaptive Security Manager for Distributed Systems

This paper presents an adaptive policy management scheme for the security threats in distributed systems. First, we investigate the security aspects of computer networks architecture and observe that security services are provided at application, transport and network layers. Network layer security presents some important opportunities for offering controls over security threats to distributed information systems connected to the global Internet. Important details of Internet Protocol (IP) security services are studied and enhancements are proposed over handling both protected and unprotected packet traffics for a dynamic environment. Dynamism is in terms of severity of security threats. The contribution of the paper includes a security policy manager (SPM), which is an adaptive security control mechanism that would automatically configure security levels for a host in response to the frequency of security attacks.