3507397
A knowledge level software engineering methodology for agent oriented programming
Our goal in this paper is to introduce and motivate a methodology, called \emph{Tropos}, for building agent oriented software systems. Tropos is based on two key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all the related mentalistic notions (for instance: beliefs, goals, actions and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from the early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents. The methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study.
393516
Filling the Gap between Requirements Engineering and Public Key/Trust Management Infrastructures
The last years have seen a major interest in designing and deploying trust management and public key infrastructures. Yet, it is still far from clear how one can pass from the organization and system requirements to the actual credentials and attribution of permissions in the PKI infrastructure. Our goal in this paper is filling this gap. We propose a formal framework for modeling and analyzing security and trust requirements, that extends the Tropos methodology for early requirements modeling. The key intuition that underlies our work is the identification of distinct roles for actors that manipulate resources, accomplish goals or execute tasks, and actors that own or permit usage of resources or goals. The paper also presents a simple case study and a PKI/trust management implementation.
8955752
Modeling Social and Individual Trust in Requirements Engineering Methodologies
When we model and analyze trust in organizations or information systems we have to take into account two different levels of analysis: social and individual. Social levels define the structure of organizations, whereas individual levels focus on individual agents. This is particularly important when capturing security requirements where a “normally” trusted organizational role can be played by an untrusted individual. 
 
Our goal is to model and analyze the two levels finding the link between them and supporting the automatic detection of conflicts that can come up when agents play roles in the organization. We also propose a formal framework that allows for the automatic verification of security requirements between the two levels by using Datalog and has been implemented in CASE tool.
464743
Specifying and analyzing early requirements in Tropos
We present a framework that supports the formal verification of early requirements specifications. The framework is based on Formal Tropos, a specification language that adopts primitive concepts for modeling early requirements (such as actor, goal, and strategic dependency), along with a rich temporal specification language. We show how existing formal analysis techniques, and in particular model checking, can be adapted for the automatic verification of Formal Tropos specifications. These techniques have been implemented in a tool, called the T-Tool, that maps Formal Tropos specifications into a language that can be handled by the NuSMV model checker. Finally, we evaluate our methodology on a course-exam management case study. Our experiments show that formal analysis reveals gaps and inconsistencies in early requirements specifications that are by no means trivial to discover without the help of formal analysis tools.
3393049
Data Sharing in the Hyperion Peer Database System
This demo presents Hyperion, a prototype system that supports data sharing for a network of independent Peer Relational Database Management Systems (PDBMSs). The nodes of such a network are assumed to be autonomous PDBMSs that form acquaintances at run-time, and manage mapping tables to define value correspondences among different databases. They also use distributed Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules to enable and coordinate data sharing. Peers perform local querying and update processing, and also propagate queries and updates to their acquainted peers. The demo illustrates the following key functionalities of Hyperion: (1) the use of (data level) mapping tables to infer new metadata as peers dynamically join the network, (2) the ability to answer queries using data in acquaintances, and (3) the ability to coordinate peers through update propagation.
5771700
Information services for the Web: building and maintaining domain models
The World Wide Web is serving as a leading vehicle for information dissemination by offering information services, such as product information, group interactions, or sales transactions. Three major factors affect the performance and reliability of information services for the Web: the distribution of information which has resulted from the globalization of information systems, the heterogeneity of information sources, and the sources' instability caused by their autonomous evolution. This paper focuses on integrating existing information sources, available via the Web, in the delivery of information services. The primary objective of the paper is to provide mechanisms for structuring and maintaining a domain model for Web applications. These mechanisms are based on conceptual modeling techniques, where concepts are being defined and refined within a meta-data repository through the use of instantiation, generalization and attribution. Also, active databases techniques are exploited to provide robust mechanisms for maintaining a consistent domain model in a rapidly evolving environment, such as the Web.
2115447
Security and privacy requirements analysis within a social setting
Security issues for software systems ultimately concern relationships among social actors stakeholders, system users, potential attackers - and the software acting on their behalf. We propose a methodological framework for dealing with security and privacy requirements based on i*, an agent-oriented requirements modeling language. The framework supports a set of analysis techniques. In particular, attacker analysis helps identify potential system abusers and their malicious intents. Dependency vulnerability analysis helps detect vulnerabilities in terms of organizational relationships among stakeholders. Countermeasure analysis supports the dynamic decision-making process of defensive system players in addressing vulnerabilities and threats. Finally, access control analysis bridges the gap between security requirement models and security implementation models. The framework is illustrated with an example involving security and privacy concerns in the design of agent-based health information systems. In addition, we discuss model evaluation techniques, including qualitative goal model analysis and property verification techniques based on model checking.
1771068
Hierarchical hippocratic databases with minimal disclosure for virtual organizations
The protection of customer privacy is a fundamental issue in today’s corporate marketing strategies. Not surprisingly, many research efforts have proposed new privacy-aware technologies. Among them, Hippocratic databases offer mechanisms for enforcing privacy rules in database systems for inter-organizational business processes (also known as virtual organizations). This paper extends these mechanisms to allow for hierarchical purposes, distributed authorizations and minimal disclosure supporting the business processes of virtual organizations that want to offer their clients a number of ways to fulfill a service. Specifically, we use a goal-oriented approach to analyze privacy policies of the enterprises involved in a business process. On the basis of the purpose hierarchy derived through a goal refinement process, we provide algorithms for determining the minimum set of authorizations needed to achieve a service. This allows us to automatically derive access control policies for an inter-organizational business process from the collection of privacy policies associated with different participating enterprises. By using effective on-line algorithms, the derivation of such minimal information can also be done on-the-fly by the customer wishing to access a service.