Abstract

SPARTA (Security Policy Adaptation Reinforced Through Agents) proposes to develop a software application, based on the newest agent technology, consisting of several modules in order to reach and maintain a high level of the IT security. In addition, intelligent agents will assist in co-ordination of security tasks (immediate actions and decision supporting) and co-operation between distributed components in the areas of integral system protection and intruder detection. The use of this software will stimulate proactive decision making. Therefore this project also proposes a methodology to elaborate an flexible, effective, balanced and situation based security policy. Actual information obtained from agents, the best practise and the traditional codes of conduct will be weighted in order to obtain the optimal security policy. Besides well known security criteria for IT products and IT systems, the project will evaluate additional, personalised security criteria of IT services.

Objectives

The objective is the creation, development, provision, composition and management of innovative and intelligent security modules across heterogeneous platforms and networks. The intelligent agent modules are focused on maintaining the level of IT elements security high, while at the same time providing a decision support information to the security managers. The second objective is to define a methodology to elaborate efficient security policy in order to support such advanced functionality as intelligent agent based tools.

Project tasks

The project will contain the following main work components, some of them overlapping in the time schedule:

• development of a strategic framework;
• decisions about scalability, extensibility and flexibility;
• identification of requirements and global definition and classification of existing IT elements, new IT elements (smartcards, active Web content, digital signature…) and IT services;
• definition of parameters, threats and risks; conceptual design of the intelligent system components and a repository;
• defining roles and responsibilities, standards and guidelines and the fragmentation into the situation oriented areas;
• functional design of components such as agents and module design;
• architecture of agents and their encapsulating; development of modules with a single peer agents;
• designing agent to agent communication and agent mobility; developing modules with the mobile communicating agents;
• installation of the prototype system on pilot sites and detailed evaluation;
• test of the prototype system and gathering feedback;
• elaboration of the adaptive security policy, using the new methodology;
• user support: documentation, demonstration, workshops etc.;
• usability study:
  - at an early stage collect user requirements as a basis of the system;
  - at a later stage compare them with evaluation results and draw conclusions for future developments;

  impact study and business models.

Expected results

Expected result are:

• detailed analysis of user needs and the present security policy that will facilitate mapping into functional components and modules;
• full functional and technical description of new components;
• integration of modules into the existing system and migrating to proposed security policy;
• interoperable and platform independence of components and modules;
• verification of project objectives by measuring the administrator response time in first line helpdesk and evaluating decision makers satisfaction.