Introduction

Abstract

Self-protection is a key property of Autonomic Computing systems that researchers have only begun to study in relation to designing adaptive security mechanisms. The autonomic property allows a computing system to prevent security failures by analyzing the system’s behavior and acting to close security loopholes before they are exploited maliciously. Specifically, we consider how cryptographic keys can be used to reinforce the security of password based access control schemes. We discuss the need to extend access control schemes to handle changing conditions flexibly, and some of the possible reasons why the security domain unlike other computing domains, has been slow on applying the paradigm of Autonomic Computing in the design of adaptive access control mechanisms.