Toward secure autonomic pervasive environments

Current trends toward autonomic environments lead to the definition and integration of existing and new technologies to enable self-management. However, self-management involves key issues such as self-configuration, auto-adaptation, self-protection, and self-optimization of autonomous systems. This is usually achieved by providing each environment with paradigms that bring awareness about its pervasiveness and enabled tools to self-manage and adapt the environment´s resources to the changes occurring in the surroundings. The challenge is to dynamically configure and adapt networks to deal with the changes that are not less frequent and which results from users´ roaming and services requests, changing services constraints, adding or removing services, and adding, upgrading or removing policies. To address these issues, we investigated the integration of policies for auto-configuration and control, agents as management entities, and ontologies for environment´s concepts modeling and auto-adaptation. Self-protecting sensitive information is addressed by the definition of a public key infrastructure with X.509 certificates.