A Model-Based Approach to Secure Multiparty Distributed Systems

Securing multi-party distributed systems is still a challenge. In such distributed systems with completely distributed interactions between parties with mutual distrust, it is hard to control the illicit flowing of private information to unintended parties. Unlike some existing solutions dealing with verification of low-level cryptographic protocol in multi-party interactions, we propose a novel approach based on model transformations to build secure-by-construction multi-party distributed systems. The user has to describe his system in a component-based model and annotate it to define the system security policy. Then, the system is checked and when valid, a secure code, consistent with the desired security policy, is automatically generated. To validate the approach, we present a framework that implements our method and we use it to secure an online social network application.