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Adaptable Situation-Aware Secure Service-Based (AS3) Systems
(Start from July 2004)
Introduction
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has the major advantage of enabling rapid composition of distributed applications, and will be a new-generation computing architecture for many critical global service-based systems, such as Global Information Grid (GIG) and Cyber Infrastructure. In these systems, various capabilities are provided by different organizations as services and interconnected by various types of networks, including wireless (infrastructure or ad hoc) and wired networks. These services can be integrated following specific workflows, which are necessary for users to exploit these services to fulfill specific mission goals. For critical global service-based systems, high confidence and adaptability are of prime concern in order to ensure the users that they can use these systems anywhere, any time using various devices, knowing that their confidentiality and privacy are well protected and the systems will adapt to satisfy their needs in various situations. Hence, these systems must be adaptable, situation-aware and secure. Although various techniques have been proposed to improve the security and dynamic service composition of service-based systems, no effective enabling techniques for Adaptable Situation-aware Secure Service-based (AS3) Systems are available.
In this project, we are conducting basic research, which will result in a set of new and effective techniques for rapid development, deployment and operations of AS3 systems with hierarchical situation-awareness capability, flexible policy-based security, and adaptive service composition and management capability. The techniques to be generated are for (i) situation-awareness requirement specification and verification, runtime situation analysis and autonomous situation-triggered service coordination, (ii) security policy specification and verification, and runtime policy enforcement and diagnosis, and (iii) service semantic specification and checking, automated service generation, intelligent service discovery, adaptive service contraction and composition. The three PIs' research groups with different expertise on situation-awareness, security, model checking and service composition will work in concert on this research project. Specifically, we are working on the following aspects:
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To achieve hierarchical situation-awareness, we plan to establish a hierarchical situation-awareness model, which combines OWL ontology and situation-aware ambients, and develop situation-awareness specification and verification techniques based on the proposed model. With these results, we will generate efficient agent-based hierarchical distributed situation analysis and situation-triggered service coordination methods.
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To achieve flexible policy-based security, we will establish an security policy ontology and combine it to Secure Operations Language (SOL) developed at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). A security policy verification technique based on SALSA or other tools will be developed to ensure the correctness and consistency of policy specifications. A distributed trust management mechanism and an abduction-based diagnosis and recovery engine will be developed for runtime policy enforcement.
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To achieve adaptive service composition and management, we will first establish a service ontology, a service specification language and an intelligent ontology-based service discovery protocol. Then an adaptive service contraction and composition technique will be developed to automate the workflow synthesis and distribution. A service semantic checking approach will be developed to facilitate the adaptive multiparty service composition.
The expected results of this research project should greatly improve situation-awareness, security and adaptability of service-based systems. We anticipate that our expected results can easily be integrated with other ongoing research effort on service-based systems, such as Web Services and GIG Enterprise Services (GES). The software tools generated from this project will enhance the rapid development of adaptable situation-aware secure service-based systems.