Trustworthiness Assessment Framework for Net-Centric Systems

Modern applications are becoming increasingly large-scale and network-centric, involving a variety of different types of system entities. Also, the assurance requirements for these systems are evolving due to the continuing emergence of new threats from new operational environments. To assure the trustworthiness of these systems to a sufficiently high degree of confidence is a challenging task. Most existing methods require different specialized assessment techniques for not only different types of system entities but also different trustworthiness aspects. Also, most existing techniques lack consideration of the overall system trustworthiness assessment from an integrated system perspective or fail to provide a holistic view. To address these problems, we develop an ontology-based approach to provide systematic guidelines for net-centric system assessment. The ontology-based approach captures evolving system trustworthiness aspects and effectively models their relationships and correlations. It can also organize system entities and associate appropriate assessment techniques for each class of system entities and their integrations.