Presented at the 9th International Conference on Mobile Web Information Systems, MobiWIS 2012, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, August 27-29, 2012 by Phu Phung More detail: http://www.cs.uic.edu/~phu/

1. August 27-29, 2012, Niagara Falls,
Ontario, Canada
GOVERNING BOT-AS-A-SERVICE IN
SUSTAINABILITY PLATFORMS -
ISSUES AND APPROACHES
Hong-Linh Truonga, Phu H. Phungb
,
and Schahram Dustdara
aVienna University of Technology, Austria
bChalmers University of Technology, Sweden
1

2. CONTEXT:
FACILITY MONITORING IN SMART CITIES
Sensor data is aggregated and
propagated to cloud-based data
services
Sensors are deployed in buildings to
monitor building MEP (Mechanical,
Electrical, and Plumbing) systems
and the surrounding environments
Online
monitoring
cloud services
2

3. BOT PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE –
IN A RECENT EMERGING CONCEPT
A bot is a lightweight
application that is
executed by a hosting
environment
supports the development, composition of
bots, management, and deployment
of bots, and the definition and management of
governance policies for bots
Bots can be deployed at the
facility sites to detect problems
and
fix them automatically
stores bots and templates for
building bots
3

4. OUR INTELLIGENT BOT EXECUTION MODEL
 The code of a bot is generated on-demand
when a possible problem is detected
 Cloud service finds suitable rules and
algorithms for the logic of the bot
 Cloud service builds bots (using template) and
rules/algorithms
 Cloud service sends bots to the gateway which
executes bots for fixing problems
4

5. THE LIFECYCLE OF A BOT
(i) Development
 bots are compiled from source code or bots
are composed from existing objects/bots
(ii) Deployment
 bots are transferred from clouds to hosting
environments for execution
(iii) Execution
 bots are running in hosting environments
5

6. GOVERNANCE ISSUES
1. System/network security and access
control
 protect systems and networks in order to prevent
unauthorized access that can compromise BoP.
2. Application integrity and service
verification
 ensure that the bot content is sent by the trusted
party and is unchanged
3. Service contract management
 bot capabilities are depending on a service
contract (pay-per-use model)
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7. GOVERNANCE ISSUES
4. System and application performance
 ensure that the execution of bots will not prevent
the correct operation and the availability of hosting
environments.
5. Data acquisition and control
 Bots will access data from local hosting
environments and sensor integration gateways as
well as data from the cloud platform.
7

8. MOTIVATION
Is the state of the art in policy
enforcement can applied in the Bot-as-
a-Service (BaaS) governance
issues?
If not,
 What are the issues?
 How can we enforce governance
policies for the BaaS ?
8

9. STATE-OF-THE-ART & OPEN CHALLENGES
 Static analysis cannot check runtime violations.
Code signing can only certify the integrity of
the code
 Execution monitoring techniques are not
targeted to our BaaS model
 service contract for bot instances of a consumer
 application-level data access monitoring for data
acquisition and control
 Policies for application performance can be
defined in the development or deployment
phases
9

10. DISCUSSION ON THE STATE-OF-THE-ART
No existing techniques supports
 multiple types of governance and
 diverse types of hosting environments
(capabilities are limited)
No existing governance policy
specifications
 Allows different types of governance
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11. OUR APPROACHES
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A policy enforcement framework
specifically for the BaaS
 Policy definition and management
 Different types of governance
 Policy enforcement
 Multi-phase enforcement of different
types of governance

12. POLICY DEFINITION AND MANAGEMENT
Bot instances
-with runtime
context-specific
policies
Bot instances
-with runtime
context-specific
policies
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Bot-specific policies
E.g. the bot can only
access a Samsung TV
Consumer’s business service
contract
E.g. 50 USD for 1 month use
Bot hosting context-specific
policies
E.g. host platform,
capabilities
Bot instances
-with runtime
context-specific
policies
Policy templates for bot-specific and
context-specific policies are based on
API calls

13. POLICY ENFORCEMENT
 Static analysis and code rewriting for bot
context specific policies (Development phase)
Code signing for deployment
 Inlined execution monitoring (Runtime phase)
 Policy-inlined bot instance
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The framework should provide
extensible mechanisms to enable
plug-ins of different techniques

14. OUR APPROACHES
14

15. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
Bot-as-a-Service architecture is
presented together with critical reviews of
governance issues and existing
techniques
New Approaches for governance and
enforcement in sustainability platforms.
Future work focuses on the
development of
 policy definition, management and
enforcement framework
support cross governance issues for bots
15

16. 16

17. POLICY DEFINITION AND MANAGEMENT
 Policy templates for bot-specific and context-specific
policies are based on API calls
 provided by the hosting environment
 and by cloud services
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18. POLICY DEFINITION AND MANAGEMENT
 Bot-specific policies
 E.g. the bot can only access a Samsung TV
 Consumer’s business service contract
 E.g. 50 USD for 1 month use
 Bot hosting context-specific policies
 E.g. host platform, capabilities
 Bot runtime context-specific policies
bot context-specific
policies
 Policy templates for bot-specific and context-specific
policies are based on API calls
19

19. STATE-OF-THE-ART
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