A Model Driven Method to Design and Analyze Secure Architectures of Systems-of-Systems

Abstract

Context: Systems-of-Systems (SoS) is becoming the major paradigm for engineering next generation solutions such as smart cities, health-care and emergency response. However, SoS differentiating characteristics, such as emergent behavior, may introduce specific issues that make ensuring their security a critical challenge. Objective: the aim of this study is to investigate how Software Engineering approaches can be extended to model and analyze secure SoS solutions for discovering high impact cascading attacks at the architecture stage. Method: in order to achieve our objective, we followed the guidelines of Model Driven Engineering to propose a method, Systems-of-Systems Security (SoSSec), that comprises: (1) an architectural description language for modeling SoS and its vulnerabilities and (2) a MultiAgent System for security analysis of SoS architectures.