A model-based approach to secure multiparty distributed systems

Abstract

Within distributed systems with completely distributed interactions between parties with mutual distrust, it is hard to control the (illicit) flowing of private information to unintended parties. Unlike existing methods dealing with verification of low-level cryptographic protocols, we propose a novel model-based approach based on model transformations to build a secure-by-construction multiparty distributed system. First, starting from a component-based model of the system, the designer annotates different parts of it in order to define the security policy. Then, the security is checked and when valid, a secure distributed model, consistent with the desired security policy, is automatically generated. To illustrate the approach, we present a framework that implements our method and use it to secure an online social network application.