Anonymity and Confidentiality in Secure Distributed Simulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to ensure anonymity and confidentiality in distributed simulations, addressing security concerns in modern distributed and cloud-based simulation environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for secure distributed simulation that considers anonymity and confidentiality, along with a performance evaluation demonstrating its viability.

Findings

The proposed solution maintains confidentiality and anonymity effectively.

Performance penalties for anonymity are quantifiable and acceptable.

The approach is viable for real-world distributed simulation systems.

Abstract

Research on data confidentiality, integrity and availability is gaining momentum in the ICT community, due to the intrinsically insecure nature of the Internet. While many distributed systems and services are now based on secure communication protocols to avoid eavesdropping and protect confidentiality, the techniques usually employed in distributed simulations do not consider these issues at all. This is probably due to the fact that many real-world simulators rely on monolithic, offline approaches and therefore the issues above do not apply. However, the complexity of the systems to be simulated, and the rise of distributed and cloud based simulation, now impose the adoption of secure simulation architectures. This paper presents a solution to ensure both anonymity and confidentiality in distributed simulations. A performance evaluation based on an anonymized distributed simulator is used for quantifying the performance penalty for being anonymous. The obtained results show that this is a viable solution.