A SECURITY SIMULATION MODEL FOR LARGE SCALE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Today there is a growing interest for large scale distributed systems, both from academia and the industrial environment. If until recently the research in this area mainly focused on developing operational infrastructures, currently many applications have some additional needs. Among these, security represents a hot research topic. In this paper we present a simulation model suitable for evaluating methods and techniques designed to increase security in large distributed systems. The model has the characteristics needed to develop a wide range of security scenarios, being able to assess from solutions to secure data transfers to various mechanisms to assess the access management in a distributed system. The model was implemented as an extension of the MONARC simulator for distributed systems. We present experimental results demonstrating its capabilities to correctly model security solutions for large scale distributed systems, and to pinpoint likely security problems in the simulated environments.