Biblio

This paper investigates security of Kepler scientificbworkflow engine. We are especially interested in Kepler-based scientific workflows that may operate in cloud environments. We find that (1) three security properties (i.e., input validation, remote access validation, and data integrity) are essential for making Kepler-based workflows more secure, and (2) that use of the Kepler provenance module may help secure Keplerbased workflows. We implemented a prototype security enhanced Kepler engine to demonstrate viability of use of the Kepler provenance module in provision and management of the desired security properties.

Access Control Policies (ACPs) evolve. Understanding the trends and evolution patterns of ACPs could provide guidance about the reliability and maintenance of ACPs. Our research goal is to help policy authors improve the quality of ACP evolution based on the understanding of trends and evolution patterns in ACPs We performed an empirical study by analyzing the ACP changes over time for two systems: Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), and an open-source virtual computing platform (VCL). We measured trends in terms of the number of policy lines and lines of code (LOC), respectively. We observed evolution patterns. For example, an evolution pattern st1 → st2 says that st1 (e.g., "read") evolves into st2 (e.g., "read" and "write"). This pattern indicates that policy authors add "write" permission in addition to existing "read" permission. We found that some of evolution patterns appear to occur more frequently.

This paper examines security faults/vulnerabilities reported for Fedora. Results indicate that, at least in some situations, fault roughly constant may be used to guide estimation of residual vulnerabilities in an already released product, as well as possibly guide testing of the next version of the product.