Integrating Deployment Techniques with Monitoring: The Proactive Configuration Checker (PCC)

Assuring security in distributed systems is a complex issue, nowadays getting more and more sensitive, because important services are exposed using Internet. Moreover, new concepts must be considered by computer scientists: resilience, maintainability and availability. One of the first consequences of successful attacks or management errors is the modification of configurations. While tools already exist able to check whether configurations are correct and compliant, there is no integration of these techniques with policy specification and related deployment. In this paper, it is presented the Proactive Configuration Checker (PCC), a tool designed to test configurations for modification that takes advantage from an integrated approach, starting from policy specification to automatic deployment, in order to detect attacks, while reducing false positives.