Causality-based accountability mechanisms for socio-technical systems

With the rapid deployment of socio-technical systems into all aspects of daily life, we need to be prepared for their failures. It is inherently impractical to specify all the lawful interactions of these systems, in turn, the possibility of invalid interactions cannot be excluded at design time. As modern systems might harm people, or compromise assets if they fail, they ought to be accountable. Accountability is an interdisciplinary concept that cannot be easily described as a holistic technical property of a system. Thus, in this paper, we propose a bottom-up approach to enable accountability using goal-specific accountability mechanisms. Each mechanism provides forensic capabilities that help us to identify the root cause for a specific type of events, both to eliminate the underlying (technical) problem and to assign blame. This paper presents the different ingredients that are required to design and build an accountability mechanism and focuses on the technical and practical utilization of causality theories as a cornerstone to achieve our goal. To the best of our knowledge, the literature lacks a systematic methodology to envision, design, and implement abilities that promote accountability in systems. With a case study from the area of microservice-based systems, which we deem representative of modern complex systems, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach as a whole. We show that it is generic enough to accommodate different accountability goals and mechanisms.