Towards Designing Energy-Aware Cybersecurity Policies

Cybersecurity is a fundamental aspect of socio-technical systems. Unfortunately, the price to pay for a secure system is an overhead of computational power and, therefore, of energy consumption. With the last global events, energy consumption is not anymore a secondary effect but should become a relevant driver of decisions on the security measures to implement. Thus, the design of security policies for socio-technical systems should consider energy consumption to carefully choose security measures to deploy. Security policies identify the security objectives of actors in socio-technical systems, the security measures that enforce them, and the business processes affected by these measures. In this direction, the goal of this paper is to propose a method for the energy-aware design of security policies. An estimation of the energy consumption of security goals will be calculated to allow the definition of security policies considering their energy consumption.