An introduction to Quality of Security Services

Abstract

We examine the concept of security as a dimension of Quality of Service in distributed systems. We provide a discussion and examples of user- specified security variables and show how the range of service levels associated with these variables can support the provision of Quality of Security Service. We also discuss various design implications regarding security ranges provided in a QoS-aware distributed system. Our goal has been to provide an understanding of QoSS and variant security, and to determine whether these concepts can be useful in improving security service and system performance in QoS-aware distributed systems. We described the general requirements for system attributes to participate in the provision of Quality of Service, and described how certain security attributes might meet these requirements. We then described various forms of user and application security "ranges "and showed how these ranges can make sense in relation to existing security policies, when those ranges are presented as user choices. Finally we described security ranges as forming a coherent system of relationships in a distributed multi-tiered system. Our conclusion is that it may be possible for security to be a semantically meaningful dimension of Quality of Service without compromising existing security policies. Further study is needed to understand the effectiveness of QoSS in improving system performance in QoS-aware systems.