Extending a Multi-Agent Systems Simulation Architecture for Systems-of-Systems Security Analysis

Abstract

Security is an important concern for softwareintensive Systems-of-Systems (SoS). Architectural analysis for SoS secturity assessment should be performed at early stages of development. Such activity could prevent vulnerabilities and avoid potential cascading attack emergent behaviors, i.e., a succession of security vulnerabilities that emerge from individual constituents security fragilities, potentially causing interruption and collapse of SoS operation. Model simulation can prevent these issues by predicting, at design-time, how SoS will behave regarding its reaction to potential attacks. As security is a quality attribute, i.e., a property that comes up from the relation between software parts, software architecture analysis and simulation are an additional support for the prediction of SoS security. However, despite recent advances in such area, few simulation approaches have tackled simulation of secure SoS architectures where the basis of the described models are the SoS behavior or the interactions among the SoS Constituent Systems (CS). The main contribution of this paper is offering a big picture of how recent advances on SoS security analysis via simulations can form a robust framework for SoS security prediction. We argue the pertinence of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for SoS simulation due to similarities between MAS and SoS concepts, and we report how MAS simulation enables the visualization of emergent behaviors and how they impact the SoS security. Our results to foster SoS security analysis include (i) an extension of a MAS conceptual model and platform to include security concepts, (ii) a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach that adopts automatic mappings between secure SoS architecture modeled using an existing SysML-based modeling language, namely the SoSSecML, and (iii) a MAS platform to support such analysis.

Agent-Oriented Methodologies Evaluation Frameworks: A Review

“…For example, [91] reviews agent-based cloud computing, [92] and [93] review the agent-based internet of things and cyber-physical systems and [94] reviews the applications of MAS in digital factories. By reviewing some of the applications proposed in the literature for MAS in these emerging technologies, one can con¯rm the vast potential of future work, such as smart vehicles and tra±c control systems [95][96][97][98], personalized medicine and healthcare systems [99][100][101], security and safety [102,103] and smart manufacturing [104,105]. This coupling can be attributed to the unique characteristics considered for agents and their capabilities for interaction.…”

Evaluation of Systems-of-Systems Software Architectures: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

“…Security, addressed in four studies, is associated with the prevention of cascading attacks, deined as a succession of security vulnerabilities from fragilities in the interconnection among constituents of an SoS, which potentially cause interruption and collapse of its operations [55]. Therefore, the main concerns regarding SoS security are the avoidance of attack propagation and protection to both information and data of constituents from an unauthorized access.…”

A Design of the Resilient Enterprise: A Reference Architecture for Emergent Behaviors Control

“…The results of both scoring criteria were merged and all papers with an aggregated score of at least 6 were included in the literature list. Complementing this list with our previous two articles [ 19 , 20 ] and four manually added papers [ 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 ], resulted into a total of 46 papers [ 19 , 20 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 87 , 88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 , 99 , 100 , 101 , 102 , 103 , 104 , 105 , 106 ,…”

“…Nevertheless, a total of 26 ( ) papers concerned either an ongoing study or a complete study, which implies that there is some mature basis from whereon we can build further. Furthermore, it is interesting that several papers [ 19 , 20 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 86 , 93 , 95 , 96 ] use agent-based modeling techniques to support their work.…”