Autonomic computing for defense-in-depth information assurance: architecture and a case study

Abstract

In recent years, defense-in-depth information assurance is one of the main focuses in information security research. However, the complexity of information assurance systems increases rapidly with more and more security functions and subsystems being included. In this paper, we propose an autonomic computing architecture for defense-in-depth information assurance systems (DDIAS) so that the increasing complexity of DDIAS can be tackled by distributed autonomous security subsystems with the abilities of self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing and self-protection. We also present a case study of autonomic computing for distributed emergency response and incident recovery, which is usually the last line of in-depth defense. In the case study, we combine the tenure duty method (TDM) with autonomic system architecture to realize autonomic service roaming and dynamic backup. Experiments show that the proposed method greatly improves the survivability of information systems without much loss of quality of service. © Springer-Verlag 2004.