Towards visual configuration support for interdependent security goals

Abstract

This work investigates visual support for easing the configuration of interdependent security goals. The interdependent nature of security goals did not receive sufficient attention in related work yet. A formal approach to adequately model interdependent security goals are multi-criteria optimization problems which can be solved either exactly or heuristically. This however depends on the question if the user is able to articulate his/her preferences regarding security goals. Furthermore, heuristic approaches confront users with possibly unlimited alternative configurations where each solution is equally well. In order to support users in the process of articulating preferences and selecting a suiting alternative, we provide visual facilities at the level of the user interface. The need for handling such issues emerged from the analysis of the EU funded di.me project which explicitly requires that such configurations are carried out by lay users. We present an approach tackling these issues by means of visual concepts triggering a service selection in the background which respects the interdependence of security goals. We concretely discuss the application of our approach by addressing a scenario concerned with deployment decisions in the di.me project. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.