A Collaborative Approach for Access Control, Intrusion Detection and Security Testing

Security Management is becoming a critical aspect for large scale distributed systems. In this paper, we propose a global architecture, based on an original meta-policy approach for access control and intrusion detection, allowing to guarantee global security properties. In contrast with classical meta-policy based systems, by applying verification techniques on the meta-policy, our solution guarantees global security properties while supporting local updates of the security policy. It is thus a powerful solution that provides strong fault tolerance since the control is carried out in a complete decentralized manner. By using a meta-policy, the system can verify the respect of global security properties after meta or local modifications of the policy. Thanks to test components, our system is also able to evaluate and configure in real-time each of its functionalities while tracking self corruption by malicious hackers. Our architecture is a cooperative multi agent-based system, making it possible to activate a functionality independently from some others. It is divided into several levels, each one contributing to the automation of the security management.