Principal Investigator Abel Sanchez
Understanding and predicting the security behavior of hardware configurations and software applications in a global data infrastructure is one of today's biggest challenges. We propose a simulator-based approach, providing a granularity down to the individual server component and client action. The goal is to provide operators and designers a tool that allows understanding and predicting the consequences of the deployment of new network topologies, hardware configurations or software applications in a global data infrastructure, without affecting the service.
The simulator introduces a holistic way of viewing performance, reliability, and availability of a globally distributed infrastructure and the information security mechanisms that safe guard them by borrowing ideas from meteorological weather to develop a holistic view of simulated IT infrastructure. The fundamentals of visualization and the use of event correlation will help to create an automated means of stepping through the process of finding a pattern in the events that are occurring. These patterns will help in analysis and decision making in order to mitigate the risk associated with a general performance and availability to information security.