Combining MILS with contract-based design for safety and security requirements

Abstract

The distributed MILS (D-MILS) approach to high-assurance systems is based on an architecture-driven end-to-end methodology that encompasses techniques and tools for modeling the system architecture, contract-based analysis of the architecture, automatic configuration of the platform, and assurance case generation from patterns. Following the MILS (“MILS” was originally an acronym for “Multiple Independent Levels of Security”. Today, we use “MILS” as a proper name for an architectural approach and an implementation framework, promulgated by a community of interested parties, and elaborated by ongoing MILS research and development efforts.) paradigm, the architecture is pivotal to define the security policy that is to be enforced by the platform, and to design safety mechanisms such as redundancies or failures monitoring. In D-MILS we enriched these security guarantees with formal reasoning to show that the global system requirements are met provided local policies are guaranteed by application components. We consider both safety-related and security-related requirements and we analyze the decomposition also taking into account the possibility of component failures. In this paper, we give an overview of our approach and we exemplify the architecture-driven paradigm for design and verification with an example of a fail-secure design pattern.