The PoSecCo Security Decision System

This paper presents the PoSecCo approach to policy refinement, that is, the problem of deriving the configurations for the security controls from a set of high-level security requirements. This process is very important for the security and trustworthiness of the IT infrastructure as confirmed by many studies that indicate it as the major cause of security breaches and availability problems. The PoSecCo project proposes an integrated system that refines a high-level policy into a set of configurations for the security controls available in the information system. This is named the PoSecCo Security Decision Support System (SDSS). The SDSS assists the administrators in all the configuration generation phases, it guides them into the policy specification and refinement process, helping them to make the right decision, and, finally, automatically performs the refinement and analysis.