Security Issues in Self-Improving System Integration – Challenges and Solution Strategies

Self-improving system integration (SISSY) has been proposed as an approach to master Interwoven Systems and the resulting complexity issues. This results in a further transfer of traditional design-time decisions to runtime and from the engineer to the systems themselves. As a side-effect of the desired automatic reactions regarding the own integration status in an overall system structure, novel attack vectors and security threats appear. In this article, we classify the underlying attacker types, identify the SISSY-specific security threats, and propose research directions for counter measures to cope with these threats.