A Genetic Algorithms-Based Approach for Optimized Self-protection in a Pervasive Service Middleware

With increasingly complex and heterogeneous systems in pervasive service computing, it becomes more and more important to provide self-protected services to end users. In order to achieve selfprotection, the corresponding security should be provided in an optimized manner considering the constraints of heterogeneous devices and networks. In this paper, we present a Genetic Algorithms-based approach for obtaining optimized security configurations at run time, supported by a set of security OWL ontologies and an event-driven framework. This approach has been realized as a prototype for self-protection in the Hydra middleware, and is integrated with a framework for enforcing the computed solution at run time using security obligations. The experiments with the prototype on configuring security strategies for a pervasive service middleware show that this approach has acceptable performance, and could be used to automatically adapt security strategies in the middleware.