An adaptable security manager for real-time transactions

The rising demand for real-time services over networks, such as Web-based information services, requires new approaches for balancing competing demands on limited resources. The BeeHive database system proposes a novel solution to this need by the use of adaptive real time, fault tolerance, quality of service and security services based on rules embedded in individual objects. These rules prescribe tradeoffs of alternate levels of service (and cost) when resource contention becomes a problem. The approach momentarily trades off the level of security to achieve the required real-time performance. In many situations, this is an acceptable, and even preferred, solution. We have developed an adaptable security manager to provide alternate levels of communications security to multiple users and to dynamically adapt to real-time performance conditions. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of the proposed security manager that utilizes the notion of adaptable security services.