Towards a Framework for Autonomic Security Protocols

Abstract

Abstract. This paper proposes a belief logic based approach that allows principals to negotiate and on-the-fly generate security protocols. When principals wish to interact then, rather than offering each other a fixed menu of 'known' protocols, they negotiate and generate a new protocol that is tailored specifically to their current security environment and requirements. This approach provides a basis for autonomic security protocols. Such protocols are self-configuring since only principal assumptions and protocol goals need to be a-priori configured. The approach has the potential to survive security compromises that can be modelled as changes in the beliefs of the principals. A compromise of a key or a change in the trust relationships between principals can result in a principal self-healing and synthesising a new protocol to survive the event.

On-the-Fly Automatic Generation of Security Protocols

“…S. N. Foley and H. Zhou proposed a belief logic approach that allows entities to realize onthe-fly generation of security protocols (Zhou and Foley, 2003). Their automatic security protocol generator uses logic-based synthesis rules to guide it in a backward search for suitable protocols from protocol goals (Foley and Zhou, 2003). Their tool is more efficient than the previous one; however, it is still too slow for the dynamic generation of security protocols because all possible states are searched to generate sub-protocols, and the number of potential protocol candidates is small because of binding free variables only to formulae from known assumptions inputted as a requirements for the security protocol.…”