Scalable model-based configuration management of security services in complex enterprise networks

Security administrators face the challenge of designing, deploying and maintaining a variety of configuration files related to security systems, especially in large-scale networks. These files have heterogeneous syntaxes and follow differing semantic concepts. Nevertheless, they are interdependent due to security services having to cooperate and their configuration to be consistent with each other, so that global security policies are completely and correctly enforced. To tackle this problem, our approach supports a comfortable definition of an abstract high-level security policy and provides an automated derivation of the desired configuration files. It is an extension of policy-based management and policy hierarchies, combining model-based management (MBM) with system modularization. MBM employs an object-oriented model of the managed system to obtain the details needed for automated policy refinement. The modularization into abstract subsystems (ASs) segment the system-and the model-into units which more closely encapsulate related system components and provide focused abstract views. As a result, scalability is achieved and even comprehensive IT systems can be modelled in a unified manner. The associated tool MoBaSeC (Model-Based-Service-Configuration) supports interactive graphical modelling, automated model analysis and policy refinement with the derivation of configuration files. We describe the MBM and AS approaches, outline the tool functions and exemplify their applications and results obtained. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

TOWARD SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES AS MVC APPLICATIONS: FROM OWL-S VIA UML

OWL-S is an application of OWL, the Web Ontology Language, that describes the semantics of Web Services so that their discovery, selection, invocation and composition can be automated. The research literature reports the use of UML diagrams for the automatic generation of Semantic Web Service descriptions in OWL-S. This paper demonstrates a higher level of automation by generating complete complete Web applications from OWL-S descriptions that have themselves been generated from UML. Previously, we proposed an approach for processing OWL-S descriptions in order to produce MVC-based skeletons for Web applications. The OWL-S ontology undergoes a series of transformations in order to generate a Model-View-Controller application implemented by a combination of Java Beans, JSP, and Servlets code, respectively. In this paper, we show in detail the documents produced at each processing step. We highlight the connections between OWL-S specifications and executable code in the various Java dialects and show the Web interfaces that result from this process.