Towards Continuously Auditable Systems
Naftaly H. Minsky · 1997
We argue that the trustworthiness of evolving software systems can be significantly enhanced by a rigorous process of independent on-line monitoring throughout the evolutionary lifetime of the system. Such monitoring can prevent fraud, encourage careful maintenance, and serve as an early detector of irregularities in the state and behavior of the system. Unfortunately, there is a conflict between the concepts of on-line and independent monitoring. This conflict is due to the fact that on-line monitoring requires the embedding of some kinds of sensors in the base-system. But the introduction of such sensors requires a degree of cooperation with the developers of the base-system, and may interfere with the operations of that system, contrary to the requirements of independent monitoring. We describe a way to resolve this conflict by means of a concept of continuously auditable system introduced in this paper.