Brief Announcement: An OS Architecture for Device Self-protection

Abstract

By introducing context-awareness in the system layer, pervasive computing is a turning point in OS design. Device mobility and dynamicity of situations raise strong challenges for run-time adaptability of embedded software, while at the same time inducing new, serious threats to device security. Paradoxically, due to the multiplicity of protection requirements specific to each environment illustrated by the heterogeneity of network security policies, the solution may come from applying context-awareness to security itself. The idea is to tune security mechanisms to match the protection needs of the current device environment, such as the estimated level of risk. A manual adaptation is ruled out by the administration overhead and error potential of human intervention. To automate reconfiguration, security needs to be autonomic [2]. But how?

This work has been partially funded by the ANR SelfXL project.