COMPARISON OF MESSAGE PASSING SYSTEMS IN CONTEXT OF ADAPTIVE LOGGING METHOD

Abstract

Computer software is an important part of technological progress. As it becomes more and more complex and sophisticated, so does the need to protect it. Apart from typical information security aspects of integrity, availability and confidentiality, the scale and complexity of modern computer systems require a high level of control and observability. The main goal of this research is to build upon the foundations laid by the general idea of an adaptive logging method and introduce the next iteration of its design in the form of an appropriate message passing system to be used to propagate required changes to corresponding implementation in an effective and performant manner. Four different message passing system models are introduced, based on different technologies such as RabbitMQ message broker, communication channels in PostgreSQL database management system, general web server architecture and Linux-based process signaling interface. For each of those an overview description and graphical model is presented. Finally, the resulting comparison is conducted, comparing aspects such as reliance on third-party software, communication medium, error surface increase and authentication related considerations. As a result, the design based on process signaling approach is determined to be the most suitable for adaptive logging method, as it does not introduce any third-party software (and as such affects error surface in a somewhat negligible manner), binds directly to an observed application, is built using low level concepts that should be present in multiple different platforms and programming languages and should be able to reuse authentication logic that is already used when accessing computational machine where observed program is executed.