Adaptive System Design: Architectural Design Considerations for Secure Context Awareness

Abstract

Modern software systems increasingly operate in dynamic and unpredictable environments. This requires adaptive capabilities to maintain performance, reliability, and security. Context awareness is a crucial aspect, allowing systems to understand and react to their surroundings. However, the collection, processing, and utilization of context information introduces significant security and privacy challenges. Architectural design considerations for building secure, context-aware adaptive systems are explored. This paper presents a comprehensive architectural framework for secure, context-aware adaptive systems, integrating security and software design patterns across all functional blocks. Design patterns are reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems. By embedding security functions into each component and applying design patterns, the proposed architecture aims to build systems that are not only adaptable but are also secure. Important considerations include secure context sensing, context aggregation, dynamic policy management, and privacy-preserving data handling. The architecture emphasizes a modular and layered approach, incorporating established architectural and security design patterns.