A methodology to selecting optimal security policy for adaptive intrusion tolerant secure communication systems

Adaptation is a very crucial aspect of intrusion tolerance. In order to be tolerant in front of an attack, applications must change its security policies to be adaptive to the damaged environment. But selection of suitable optimal security policy for typical conditions and network environment is found to be a multi-criteria decision making problem. The procedure is found to be unstructured, characterized by extensive domain dependent knowledge and requiring the application of an effective and efficient multi-criteria decision making tool. The AHP technique breaks down decision making problems into finer parts to allow for easier and more logical selections. The following paper focuses on the application of the AHP technique in selecting the suitable optimal security policy for typical conditions and network environment. The relative importance of each criteria, subcriteria and sub-subcriteria is measured using pairwise comparison matrices and the overall ranking of each alternative equipment is then determined.