Self-adaptability and vulnerability assessment of secure autonomic communication networks

Risk and Vulnerability Analysis (RVA) aims at identifying the weaknesses of the networks that may be exploited to compromise the normal functions, such as service deployment, file system access permissions, applications activations and so on. Autonomic Communication Networks (ACNs) are recently proposed as business-objective driven high-level self-managed telecommunication networks with the adaptation capability to cope with increasing dynamics. Adaptation capability termed as adaptability becomes the premise of realizing thorough autonomy. As a theoretic foundation, we firstly propose an innovative Object-oriented Management Information Base (O:MIB). Secondly, a new information-theoretic security awareness strategy inspired from human immune system is proposed to reconfigure file access right, which has a direct relation with adaptability. The experimental results validate this methodology and find out a statistical bound for operators to set a vulnerability level of warning in practice. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.