Towards a Framework for Autonomic Security Protocols

This paper proposes a belief logic based approach that allows principals to negotiate and on-the-fly generate security protocols. When principals wish to interact then, rather than offering each other a fixed menu of ‘known’ protocols, they negotiate and generate a new protocol that is tailored specifically to their current security environment and requirements. This approach provides a basis for autonomic security protocols. Such protocols are self-configuring since only principal assumptions and protocol goals need to be a-priori configured. The approach has the potential to survive security compromises that can be modelled as changes in the beliefs of the principals. A compromise of a key or a change in the trust relationships between principals can result in a principal self-healing and synthesising a new protocol to survive the event.