This paper proposes an approach for automatic, service-driven configuration of networked IT systems focused on achieving a specific set of dependability properties. An automatic process starts from a service-level model to generate dependable configurations for the managed IT infrastructure. The process uses an ontology to model the services and their dependability requirements, the IT infrastructure, the available dependability mechanisms, and their configuration. Configurations are computed by model transformation rules which implement various dependability strategies with different degrees of requirements' satisfaction. Alternative configurations are generated to allow reconfiguring the system taking into account incidents or other operational conditions. A sample system hosting services based on web technologies is used as a proof-of-concept to illustrate application and extent of our approach.

Assuring security in distributed systems is a complex issue, nowadays getting more and more sensitive, because important services are exposed using Internet. Moreover, new concepts must be considered by computer scientists: resilience, maintainability and availability. One of the first consequences of successful attacks or management errors is the modification of configurations. While tools already exist able to check whether configurations are correct and compliant, there is no integration of these techniques with policy specification and related deployment. In this paper, it is presented the Proactive Configuration Checker (PCC), a tool designed to test configurations for modification that takes advantage from an integrated approach, starting from policy specification to automatic deployment, in order to detect attacks, while reducing false positives.