Biblio

Found 2688 results

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2015-10-11
Xianqing Yu, Peng Ning, Mladen A. Vouk.  2014.  Securing Hadoop in cloud. HotSoS 2014 Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security. :ArticleNo.26.

Hadoop is a map-reduce implementation that rapidly processes data in parallel. Cloud provides reliability, flexibility, scalability, elasticity and cost saving to customers. Moving Hadoop into Cloud can be beneficial to Hadoop users. However, Hadoop has two vulnerabilities that can dramatically impact its security in a Cloud. The vulnerabilities are its overloaded authentication key, and the lack of fine-grained access control at the data access level. We propose and develop a security enhancement for Cloud-based Hadoop.

2018-05-27
Weicong Ding, Prakash Ishwar, Venkatesh Saligrama, W. Clem Karl.  2014.  Sensing-aware kernel SVM. {IEEE} International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, {ICASSP} 2014, Florence, Italy, May 4-9, 2014. :2947–2951.
2015-01-09
2015-01-11
P. Gao, H. Miao, J.S. Baras.  2014.  Social Network Ad Allocation via Hyperbolic Embedding. Proceedings 53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
2018-05-11
Taha, Ahmad F, Elmahdi, Ahmed, Panchal, Jitesh H, Sun, Dengfeng.  2014.  Stability analysis of networked control systems with unknown inputs. Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton), 2014 52nd Annual Allerton Conference on. :936–942.
2015-11-23
Peter Dinges, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  2014.  Targeted Test Input Generation using Symbolic-concrete Backward Execution. 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2014).

Knowing inputs that cover a specific branch or statement in a program is useful for debugging and regression testing. Symbolic backward execution (SBE) is a natural approach to find such targeted inputs. However, SBE struggles with complicated arithmetic, external method calls, and data- dependent loops that occur in many real-world programs. We propose symcretic execution, a novel combination of SBE and concrete forward execution that can efficiently find targeted inputs despite these challenges. An evaluation of our approach on a range of test cases shows that symcretic execution finds inputs in more cases than concolic testing tools while exploring fewer path segments. Integration of our approach will allow test generation tools to fill coverage gaps and static bug detectors to verify candidate bugs with concrete test cases.

Peter Dinges, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  2014.  Targeted Test Input Generation Using Symbolic-Concrete Backward Execution.

Knowing inputs that cover a specific branch or statement in a program is useful for debugging and regression testing. Symbolic backward execution (SBE) is a natural approach to find such targeted inputs. However, SBE struggles with complicated arithmetic, external method calls, and data-dependent loops that occur in many real-world programs. We propose symcretic execution, a novel combination of SBE and concrete forward execution that can efficiently find targeted inputs despite these challenges. An evaluation of our approach on a range of test cases shows that symcretic execution finds inputs in more cases than concolic testing tools while exploring fewer path segments. Integration of our approach will allow test generation tools to fill coverage gaps and static bug detectors to verify candidate bugs with concrete test cases. This is the full version of an extended abstract that was presented at the 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2014), September 15–19, 2014, Västerås, Sweden.

2015-11-18
Fan Yang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Santiago Escobar, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain, Catherine Meadows, Naval Research Laboratory, Jose Meseguer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Paliath Narendran, University at Albany-SUNY.  2014.  Theories for Homomorphic Encryption, Unification and the Finite Variant Property. 16th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP 2014).

Recent advances in the automated analysis of cryptographic protocols have aroused new interest in the practical application of unification modulo theories, especially theories that describe the algebraic properties of cryptosystems. However, this application requires unification algorithms that can be easily implemented and easily extended to combinations of different theories of interest. In practice this has meant that most tools use a version of a technique known as variant unification. This requires, among other things, that the theory be decomposable into a set of axioms B and a set of rewrite rules R such that R has the finite variant property with respect to B. Most theories that arise in cryptographic protocols have decompositions suitable for variant unification, but there is one major exception: the theory that describes encryption that is homomorphic over an Abelian group.

In this paper we address this problem by studying various approximations of homomorphic encryption over an Abelian group. We construct a hierarchy of increasingly richer theories, taking advantage of new results that allow us to automatically verify that their decompositions have the finite variant property. This new verification procedure also allows us to construct a rough metric of the complexity of a theory with respect to variant unification, or variant complexity. We specify different versions of protocols using the different theories, and analyze them in the Maude-NPA cryptographic protocol analysis tool to assess their behavior. This gives us greater understanding of how the theories behave in actual application, and suggests possible techniques for improving performance.

2018-05-11
2018-05-27
2015-04-30
Parno, Bryan Jeffery.  2014.  Trust Extension As a Mechanism for Secure Code Execution on Commodity Computers.

From the Preface

As society rushes to digitize sensitive information and services, it is imperative that we adopt adequate security protections. However, such protections fundamentally conflict with the benefits we expect from commodity computers. In other words, consumers and businesses value commodity computers because they provide good performance and an abundance of features at relatively low costs. Meanwhile, attempts to build secure systems from the ground up typically abandon such goals, and hence are seldom adopted [Karger et al. 1991, Gold et al. 1984, Ames 1981].

In this book, a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, originally written while studying at Carnegie Mellon University, I argue that we can resolve the tension between security and features by leveraging the trust a user has in one device to enable her to securely use another commodity device or service, without sacrificing the performance and features expected of commodity systems.We support this premise over the course of the following chapters.

Introduction. This chapter introduces the notion of bootstrapping trust from one device or service to another and gives an overview of how the subsequent chapters fit together.
Background and related work. This chapter focuses on existing techniques for bootstrapping trust in commodity computers, specifically by conveying information about a computer's current execution environment to an interested party. This would, for example, enable a user to verify that her computer is free of malware, or that a remote web server will handle her data responsibly. 
Bootstrapping trust in a commodity computer. At a high level, this chapter develops techniques to allow a user to employ a small, trusted, portable device to securely learn what code is executing on her local computer. While the problem is simply stated, finding a solution that is both secure and usable with existing hardware proves quite difficult.
On-demand secure code execution. Rather than entrusting a user's data to the mountain of buggy code likely running on her computer, in this chapter, we construct an on-demand secure execution environment which can perform security sensitive tasks and handle private data in complete isolation from all other software (and most hardware) on the system. Meanwhile, non-security-sensitive software retains the same abundance of features and performance it enjoys today.
Using trustworthy host data in the network. Having established an environment for secure code execution on an individual computer, this chapter shows how to extend trust in this environment to network elements in a secure and efficient manner. This allows us to reexamine the design of network protocols and defenses, since we can now execute code on end hosts and trust the results within the network.
Secure code execution on untrusted hardware. Lastly, this chapter extends the user's trust one more step to encompass computations performed on a remote host (e.g., in the cloud).We design, analyze, and prove secure a protocol that allows a user to outsource arbitrary computations to commodity computers run by an untrusted remote party (or parties) who may subject the computers to both software and hardware attacks. Our protocol guarantees that the user can both verify that the results returned are indeed the correct results of the specified computations on the inputs provided, and protect the secrecy of both the inputs and outputs of the computations. These guarantees are provided in a non-interactive, asymptotically optimal (with respect to CPU and bandwidth) manner. 

Thus, extending a user's trust, via software, hardware, and cryptographic techniques, allows us to provide strong security protections for both local and remote computations on sensitive data, while still preserving the performance and features of commodity computers.

2015-05-01
Parno, Bryan Jeffery.  2014.  Trust Extension As a Mechanism for Secure Code Execution on Commodity Computers.

From the Preface

As society rushes to digitize sensitive information and services, it is imperative that we adopt adequate security protections. However, such protections fundamentally conflict with the benefits we expect from commodity computers. In other words, consumers and businesses value commodity computers because they provide good performance and an abundance of features at relatively low costs. Meanwhile, attempts to build secure systems from the ground up typically abandon such goals, and hence are seldom adopted [Karger et al. 1991, Gold et al. 1984, Ames 1981].

In this book, a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, originally written while studying at Carnegie Mellon University, I argue that we can resolve the tension between security and features by leveraging the trust a user has in one device to enable her to securely use another commodity device or service, without sacrificing the performance and features expected of commodity systems.We support this premise over the course of the following chapters.

Introduction. This chapter introduces the notion of bootstrapping trust from one device or service to another and gives an overview of how the subsequent chapters fit together.
Background and related work. This chapter focuses on existing techniques for bootstrapping trust in commodity computers, specifically by conveying information about a computer's current execution environment to an interested party. This would, for example, enable a user to verify that her computer is free of malware, or that a remote web server will handle her data responsibly. 
Bootstrapping trust in a commodity computer. At a high level, this chapter develops techniques to allow a user to employ a small, trusted, portable device to securely learn what code is executing on her local computer. While the problem is simply stated, finding a solution that is both secure and usable with existing hardware proves quite difficult.
On-demand secure code execution. Rather than entrusting a user's data to the mountain of buggy code likely running on her computer, in this chapter, we construct an on-demand secure execution environment which can perform security sensitive tasks and handle private data in complete isolation from all other software (and most hardware) on the system. Meanwhile, non-security-sensitive software retains the same abundance of features and performance it enjoys today.
Using trustworthy host data in the network. Having established an environment for secure code execution on an individual computer, this chapter shows how to extend trust in this environment to network elements in a secure and efficient manner. This allows us to reexamine the design of network protocols and defenses, since we can now execute code on end hosts and trust the results within the network.
Secure code execution on untrusted hardware. Lastly, this chapter extends the user's trust one more step to encompass computations performed on a remote host (e.g., in the cloud).We design, analyze, and prove secure a protocol that allows a user to outsource arbitrary computations to commodity computers run by an untrusted remote party (or parties) who may subject the computers to both software and hardware attacks. Our protocol guarantees that the user can both verify that the results returned are indeed the correct results of the specified computations on the inputs provided, and protect the secrecy of both the inputs and outputs of the computations. These guarantees are provided in a non-interactive, asymptotically optimal (with respect to CPU and bandwidth) manner. 

Thus, extending a user's trust, via software, hardware, and cryptographic techniques, allows us to provide strong security protections for both local and remote computations on sensitive data, while still preserving the performance and features of commodity computers.

Pelechrinis, Konstantinos, Krishnamurthy, Prashant, Gkantsidis, Christos.  2014.  Trustworthy Operations in Cellular Networks: The Case of PF Scheduler. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst.. 25:292–300.

Cellular data networks are proliferating to address the need for ubiquitous connectivity. To cope with the increasing number of subscribers and with the spatiotemporal variations of the wireless signals, current cellular networks use opportunistic schedulers, such as the Proportional Fairness scheduler (PF), to maximize network throughput while maintaining fairness among users. Such scheduling decisions are based on channel quality metrics and Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) feedback reports provided by the User's Equipment (UE). Implicit in current networks is the a priori trust on every UE's feedback. Malicious UEs can, thus, exploit this trust to disrupt service by intelligently faking their reports. This work proposes a trustworthy version of the PF scheduler (called TPF) to mitigate the effects of such Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. In brief, based on the channel quality reported by the UE, we assign a probability to possible ARQ feedbacks. We then use the probability associated with the actual ARQ report to assess the UE's reporting trustworthiness. We adapt the scheduling mechanism to give higher priority to more trusted users. Our evaluations show that TPF 1) does not induce any performance degradation under benign settings, and 2) it completely mitigates the effects of the activity of malicious UEs. In particular, while colluding attackers can obtain up to 77 percent of the time slots with the most sophisticated attack, TPF is able to contain this percentage to as low as 6 percent.

2014-09-17
Kurilova, Darya, Omar, Cyrus, Nistor, Ligia, Chung, Benjamin, Potanin, Alex, Aldrich, Jonathan.  2014.  Type-specific Languages to Fight Injection Attacks. Proceedings of the 2014 Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security. :18:1–18:2.

Injection vulnerabilities have topped rankings of the most critical web application vulnerabilities for several years [1, 2]. They can occur anywhere where user input may be erroneously executed as code. The injected input is typically aimed at gaining unauthorized access to the system or to private information within it, corrupting the system's data, or disturbing system availability. Injection vulnerabilities are tedious and difficult to prevent.

2015-01-12
Kurilova, Darya, Potanin, Alex, Aldrich, Jonathan.  2014.  Wyvern: Impacting Software Security via Programming Language Design.. Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU), 2014.

Breaches of software security affect millions of people, and therefore it is crucial to strive for more secure software systems. However, the effect of programming language design on software security is not easily measured or studied. In the absence of scientific insight, opinions range from those that claim that programming language design has no effect on security of the system, to those that believe that programming language design is the only way to provide “high-assurance software.” In this paper, we discuss how programming language design can impact software security by looking at a specific example: the Wyvern programming language. We report on how the design of the Wyvern programming language leverages security principles, together with hypotheses about how usability impacts security, in order to prevent command injection attacks. Furthermore, we discuss what security principles we considered in Wyvern’s design.

2016-12-05
Bradley Schmerl, Javier Camara, Jeffrey Gennari, David Garlan, Paulo Casanova, Gabriel Moreno, Thomas Glazier, Jeffrey Barnes.  2014.  Architecture-Based Self-Protection: Composing and Reasoning about Denial-of-Service Mitigations. HotSoS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security.

Security features are often hardwired into software applications, making it difficult to adapt security responses to reflect changes in runtime context and new attacks. In prior work, we proposed the idea of architecture-based self-protection as a way of separating adaptation logic from application logic and providing a global perspective for reasoning about security adaptations in the context of other business goals. In this paper, we present an approach, based on this idea, for combating denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Our approach allows DoS-related tactics to be composed into more sophisticated mitigation strategies that encapsulate possible responses to a security problem. Then, utility-based reasoning can be used to consider different business contexts and qualities. We describe how this approach forms the underpinnings of a scientific approach to self-protection, allowing us to reason about how to make the best choice of mitigation at runtime. Moreover, we also show how formal analysis can be used to determine whether the mitigations cover the range of conditions the system is likely to encounter, and the effect of mitigations on other quality attributes of the system. We evaluate the approach using the Rainbow self-adaptive framework and show how Rainbow chooses DoS mitigation tactics that are sensitive to different business contexts.

Paulo Casanova, David Garlan, Bradley Schmerl, Rui Abreu.  2014.  Diagnosing Unobserved Components in Self-Adaptive Systems. SEAMS 2014 Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems. :75-84.

Availability is an increasingly important quality for today's software-based systems and it has been successfully addressed by the use of closed-loop control systems in self-adaptive systems. Probes are inserted into a running system to obtain information and the information is fed to a controller that, through provided interfaces, acts on the system to alter its behavior. When a failure is detected, pinpointing the source of the failure is a critical step for a repair action. However, information obtained from a running system is commonly incomplete due to probing costs or unavailability of probes. In this paper we address the problem of fault localization in the presence of incomplete system monitoring. We may not be able to directly observe a component but we may be able to infer its health state. We provide formal criteria to determine when health states of unobservable components can be inferred and establish formal theoretical bounds for accuracy when using any spectrum-based fault localization algorithm.

2015-01-13
Ghorbal, Khalil, Jeannin, Jean-Baptiste, Zawadzki, Erik, Platzer, Andre, Gordon, Geoffrey, Capell, Peter.  2014.   Hybrid theorem proving of aerospace systems: Applications and challenges. Journal of Aerospace Information Systems . 11(10)

Complex software systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in aerospace applications: in particular, to
accomplish critical tasks. Ensuring the safety of these systems is crucial, as they can have subtly different behaviors
under slight variations in operating conditions. This paper advocates the use of formal verification techniques and in
particular theorem proving for hybrid software-intensive systems as a well-founded complementary approach to the
classical aerospace verification and validation techniques, such as testing or simulation. As an illustration of these
techniques, a novel lateral midair collision-avoidance maneuver is studied in an ideal setting, without accounting for
the uncertainties of the physical reality. The challenges that naturally arise when applying such technology to
industrial-scale applications is then detailed, and proposals are given on how to address these issues.

2015-01-14
Kaestner, Christian, Pfeffer, Juergen.  2014.  Limiting Recertification in Highly Configurable Systems: Analyzing Interactions and Isolation among Configuration Options. HotSoS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security.

In highly configurable systems the configuration space is too big for (re-)certifying every configuration in isolation. In this project, we combine software analysis with network analysis to detect which configuration options interact and which have local effects. Instead of analyzing a system as Linux and SELinux for every combination of configuration settings one by one (>102000 even considering compile-time configurations only), we analyze the effect of each configuration option once for the entire configuration space. The analysis will guide us to designs separating interacting configuration options in a core system and isolating orthogonal and less trusted configuration options from this core.

2018-05-23
Arney, D., Plourde, J., Schrenker, R., Mattegunta, P., Whitehead, S.F., Goldman, J.M..  2014.  Design Pillars for Medical Cyber-Physical System Middleware. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS 2014). :124–132.
2015-05-06
Potdar, M.S., Manekar, A.S., Kadu, R.D..  2014.  Android #x0022;Health-Dr. #x0022; Application for Synchronous Information Sharing. Communication Systems and Network Technologies (CSNT), 2014 Fourth International Conference on. :265-269.

Android "Health-DR." is innovative idea for ambulatory appliances. In rapid developing technology, we are providing "Health-DR." application for the insurance agent, dispensary, patients, physician, annals management (security) for annals. So principally, the ample of record are maintain in to the hospitals. The application just needs to be installed in the customer site with IT environment. Main purpose of our application is to provide the healthy environment to the patient. Our cream focus is on the "Health-DR." application meet to the patient regiment. For the personal use of member, we provide authentication service strategy for "Health-DR." application. Prospective strategy includes: Professional Authentications (User Authentication) by doctor to the patient, actuary and dispensary. Remote access is available to the medical annals, doctor affability and patient affability. "Health-DR." provides expertness anytime and anywhere. The application is middleware to isolate the information from affability management, client discovery and transit of database. Annotations of records are kept in the bibliography. Mainly, this paper focuses on the conversion of E-Health application with flexible surroundings.
 

Premnath, A.P., Ju-Yeon Jo, Yoohwan Kim.  2014.  Application of NTRU Cryptographic Algorithm for SCADA Security. Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG), 2014 11th International Conference on. :341-346.

Critical Infrastructure represents the basic facilities, services and installations necessary for functioning of a community, such as water, power lines, transportation, or communication systems. Any act or practice that causes a real-time Critical Infrastructure System to impair its normal function and performance will have debilitating impact on security and economy, with direct implication on the society. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system is a control system which is widely used in Critical Infrastructure System to monitor and control industrial processes autonomously. As SCADA architecture relies on computers, networks, applications and programmable controllers, it is more vulnerable to security threats/attacks. Traditional SCADA communication protocols such as IEC 60870, DNP3, IEC 61850, or Modbus did not provide any security services. Newer standards such as IEC 62351 and AGA-12 offer security features to handle the attacks on SCADA system. However there are performance issues with the cryptographic solutions of these specifications when applied to SCADA systems. This research is aimed at improving the performance of SCADA security standards by employing NTRU, a faster and light-weight NTRU public key algorithm for providing end-to-end security.

2015-05-04
Bheemeswara Rao, K.V., Ravi, N., Phani Bhushan, R., Pramod Kumar, K., Venkataraman, S..  2014.  Bluetooth technology: ApXLglevel end-to-end security. Communications and Signal Processing (ICCSP), 2014 International Conference on. :340-344.

The innovations in communication and computing technologies are changing the way we carry-out the tasks in our daily lives. These revolutionary and disrupting technologies are available to the users in various hardware form-factors like Smart Phones, Embedded Appliances, Configurable or Customizable add-on devices, etc. One such technology is Bluetooth [1], which enables the users to communicate and exchange various kinds of information like messages, audio, streaming music and file transfer in a Personal Area Network (PAN). Though it enables the user to carry-out these kinds of tasks without much effort and infrastructure requirements, they inherently bring with them the security and privacy concerns, which need to be addressed at different levels. In this paper, we present an application-layer framework, which provides strong mutual authentication of applications, data confidentiality and data integrity independent of underlying operating system. It can make use of the services of different Cryptographic Service Providers (CSP) on different operating systems and in different programming languages. This framework has been successfully implemented and tested on Android Operating System on one end (using Java language) and MS-Windows 7 Operating System on the other end (using ANSI C language), to prove the framework's reliability/compatibility across OS, Programming Language and CSP. This framework also satisfies the three essential requirements of Security, i.e. Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability, as per the NIST Guide to Bluetooth Security specification and enables the developers to suitably adapt it for different kinds of applications based on Bluetooth Technology.

Ding Wang, Ping Wang, Jing Liu.  2014.  Improved privacy-preserving authentication scheme for roaming service in mobile networks. Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), 2014 IEEE. :3136-3141.

User authentication is an important security mechanism that allows mobile users to be granted access to roaming service offered by the foreign agent with assistance of the home agent in mobile networks. While security-related issues have been well studied, how to preserve user privacy in this type of protocols still remains an open problem. In this paper, we revisit the privacy-preserving two-factor authentication scheme presented by Li et al. at WCNC 2013. We show that, despite being armed with a formal security proof, this scheme actually cannot achieve the claimed feature of user anonymity and is insecure against offline password guessing attacks, and thus, it is not recommended for practical applications. Then, we figure out how to fix these identified drawbacks, and suggest an enhanced scheme with better security and reasonable efficiency. Further, we conjecture that under the non-tamper-resistant assumption of the smart cards, only symmetric-key techniques are intrinsically insufficient to attain user anonymity.

Skoberne, N., Maennel, O., Phillips, I., Bush, R., Zorz, J., Ciglaric, M..  2014.  IPv4 Address Sharing Mechanism Classification and Tradeoff Analysis. Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on. 22:391-404.

The growth of the Internet has made IPv4 addresses a scarce resource. Due to slow IPv6 deployment, IANA-level IPv4 address exhaustion was reached before the world could transition to an IPv6-only Internet. The continuing need for IPv4 reachability will only be supported by IPv4 address sharing. This paper reviews ISP-level address sharing mechanisms, which allow Internet service providers to connect multiple customers who share a single IPv4 address. Some mechanisms come with severe and unpredicted consequences, and all of them come with tradeoffs. We propose a novel classification, which we apply to existing mechanisms such as NAT444 and DS-Lite and proposals such as 4rd, MAP, etc. Our tradeoff analysis reveals insights into many problems including: abuse attribution, performance degradation, address and port usage efficiency, direct intercustomer communication, and availability.