Biblio

The security threats to mobile applications are growing explosively. Mobile apps flaws and security defects open doors for hackers to break in and access sensitive information. Defensive requirements analysis should be an integral part of secure mobile SDLC. Developers need to consider the information confidentiality and data integrity, to verify the security early in the development lifecycle rather than fixing the security holes after attacking and data leaks take place. Early eliminating known security vulnerabilities will help developers increase the security of apps and reduce the likelihood of exploitation. However, many software developers lack the necessary security knowledge and skills at the development stage, and that's why Secure Mobile Software Development education is very necessary for mobile software engineers. In this paper, we propose a guided security requirement analysis based on OWASP Mobile Top ten security risk recommendations for Android mobile software development and its traceability of the developmental controls in SDLC. Building secure apps immune to the OWASP Mobile Top ten risks would be an effective approach to provide very useful mobile security guidelines.

Security and Privacy challenges are the most obstacles for the advancement of cloud computing and the erosion of trust boundaries already happening in organizations is amplified and accelerated by this emerging technology. Policy Management Frameworks are the most proper solutions to create dedicated security levels based on the sensitivity of resources and according to the mapping process between requirements cloud customers and capabilities of service providers. The most concerning issue in these frameworks is the rate of perfect matches between capabilities and requirements. In this paper, a reliable ring analysis engine has been introduced to efficiently map the security requirements of cloud customers to the capabilities of service provider and to enhance the rate of perfect matches between them for establishment of different security levels in clouds. In the suggested model a structural index has been introduced to receive the requirement and efficiently map them to the most proper security mechanism of the service provider. Our results show that this index-based engine enhances the rate of perfect matches considerably and decreases the detected conflicts in syntactic and semantic analysis.

When a large scale disaster strikes, it demands an efficient communication and coordination among first responders to save life and other community resources. Normally, the traditional communication infrastructures such as landline phone or cellular networks are damaged and dont provide adequate communication services to first responders for exchanging emergency related information. Wireless mesh networks is the promising alternatives in such type of situations. The security requirements for emergency response communications include privacy, data integrity, authentication, access control and availability. To build a secure communication system, usually the first attempt is to employ cryptographic keys. In critical-mission wireless mesh networks, a mesh router needs to maintain secure data communication with its neighboring mesh routers. The effective designs on fast pairwise key generation and rekeying for mesh routers are critical for emergency response and are essential to protect unicast traffic. In this paper, we present a security-enhanced session key generation and rekeying protocols EHPFS (enhanced 4-way handshake with PFS support). It eliminate the DoS attack problem of the 4-way handshake in 802.11s. EHPFS provides additional support for perfect forward secrecy (PFS). Even in case a Primary Master Key (PMK) is exposed, the session key PTK will not be compromised. The performance and security analysis show that EHPFS is efficient.

Cyber-attacks and intrusions in cyber-physical control systems are, currently, difficult to reliably prevent. Knowing a system's vulnerabilities and implementing static mitigations is not enough, since threats are advancing faster than the pace at which static cyber solutions can counteract. Accordingly, the practice of cybersecurity needs to ensure that intrusion and compromise do not result in system or environment damage or loss. In a previous paper [2], we described the Cyberspace Security Econometrics System (CSES), which is a stakeholder-aware and economics-based risk assessment method for cybersecurity. CSES allows an analyst to assess a system in terms of estimated loss resulting from security breakdowns. In this paper, we describe two new related contributions: 1) We map the Cyberspace Security Econometrics System (CSES) method to the evaluation and mitigation steps described by the NIST Guide to Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Security, Special Publication 800-82r2. Hence, presenting an economics-based and stakeholder-aware risk evaluation method for the implementation of the NIST-SP-800-82 guide; and 2) We describe the application of this tailored method through the use of a fictitious example of a critical infrastructure system of an electric and gas utility.

Increasing interest in cyber-physical systems with integrated computational and physical capabilities that can interact with humans can be identified in research and practice. Since these systems can be classified as safety- and security-critical systems the need for safety and security assurance and certification will grow. Moreover, these systems are typically characterized by fragmentation, interconnectedness, heterogeneity, short release cycles, cross organizational nature and high interference between safety and security requirements. These properties combined with the assurance of compliance to multiple standards, carrying out certification and re-certification, and the lack of an approach to model, document and integrate safety and security requirements represent a major challenge. In order to address this gap we developed a domain agnostic approach to model security and safety requirements in an integrated view to support certification processes during design and run-time phases of cyber-physical systems.

Establishing and operating an Information Security Management System (ISMS) to protect information values and information systems is in itself a challenge for larger enterprises and small and medium sized businesses alike. A high level of automation is required to reduce operational efforts to an acceptable level when implementing an ISMS. In this paper we present the ADAMANT framework to increase automation in information security management as a whole by establishing a continuous risk-driven and context-aware ISMS that not only automates security controls but considers all highly interconnected information security management tasks. We further illustrate how ADAMANT is suited to establish an ISO 27001 compliant ISMS for small and medium-sized enterprises and how not only the monitoring of security controls but a majority of ISMS related activities can be supported through automated process execution and workflow enactment.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are found in critical infrastructure such as for power generation and water treatment. When security requirements are incorporated into an ICS, one needs to test the additional code and devices added do improve the prevention and detection of cyber attacks. Conducting such tests in legacy systems is a challenge due to the high availability requirement. An approach using Timed Automata (TA) is proposed to overcome this challenge. This approach enables assessment of the effectiveness of an attack detection method based on process invariants. The approach has been demonstrated in a case study on one stage of a 6- stage operational water treatment plant. The model constructed captured the interactions among components in the selected stage. In addition, a set of attacks, attack detection mechanisms, and security specifications were also modeled using TA. These TA models were conjoined into a network and implemented in UPPAAL. The models so implemented were found effective in detecting the attacks considered. The study suggests the use of TA as an effective tool to model an ICS and study its attack detection mechanisms as a complement to doing so in a real plant-operational or under design.

This research in progress paper describes the role of cyber security measures undertaken in an ICT system for integrating electric storage technologies into the grid. To do so, it defines security requirements for a communications gateway and gives detailed information and hands-on configuration advice on node and communication line security, data storage, coping with backend M2M communications protocols and examines privacy issues. The presented research paves the road for developing secure smart energy communications devices that allow enhancing energy efficiency. The described measures are implemented in an actual gateway device within the HORIZON 2020 project STORY, which aims at developing new ways to use storage and demonstrating these on six different demonstration sites.

Choosing how to write natural language scenarios is challenging, because stakeholders may over-generalize their descriptions or overlook or be unaware of alternate scenarios. In security, for example, this can result in weak security constraints that are too general, or missing constraints. Another challenge is that analysts are unclear on where to stop generating new scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the Multifactor Quality Method (MQM) to help requirements analysts to empirically collect system constraints in scenarios based on elicited expert preferences. The method combines quantitative statistical analysis to measure system quality with qualitative coding to extract new requirements. The method is bootstrapped with minimal analyst expertise in the domain affected by the quality area, and then guides an analyst toward selecting expert-recommended requirements to monotonically increase system quality. We report the results of applying the method to security. This include 550 requirements elicited from 69 security experts during a bootstrapping stage, and subsequent evaluation of these results in a verification stage with 45 security experts to measure the overall improvement of the new requirements. Security experts in our studies have an average of 10 years of experience. Our results show that using our method, we detect an increase in the security quality ratings collected in the verification stage. Finally, we discuss how our proposed method helps to improve security requirements elicitation, analysis, and measurement.

Tracing and integrating security requirements throughout the development process is a key challenge in security engineering. In socio-technical systems, security requirements for the organizational and technical aspects of a system are currently dealt with separately, giving rise to substantial misconceptions and errors. In this paper, we present a model-based security engineering framework for supporting the system design on the organizational and technical level. The key idea is to allow the involved experts to specify security requirements in the languages they are familiar with: business analysts use BPMN for procedural system descriptions; system developers use UML to design and implement the system architecture. Security requirements are captured via the language extensions SecBPMN2 and UMLsec. We provide a model transformation to bridge the conceptual gap between SecBPMN2 and UMLsec. Using UMLsec policies, various security properties of the resulting architecture can be verified. In a case study featuring an air traffic management system, we show how our framework can be practically applied.

In recent years, the rapid development of virtualization and container technology brings unprecedented impact on traditional IT architecture. Trusted Computing devotes to provide a solution to protect the integrity of the target platform and introduces a virtual TPM to adapt to the challenges that virtualization brings. However, the traditional integrity measurement solution and remote attestation has limitations due to the challenges such as large of measurement and attestation cost and overexposure of configurations details. In this paper, we propose the Partial Attestation Model. The basic idea of Partial Attestation Model is to reconstruct the Chain of Trust by dividing them into several separated ones. Our model therefore enables the challenger to attest the specified security requirements of the target platform, instead of acquiring and verifying the complete detailed configurations. By ignoring components not related to the target requirements, our model reduces the attestation costs. In addition, we further implement an attestation protocol to prevent overexposure of the target platform's configuration details. We build a use case to illustrate the implementation of our model, and the evaluations on our prototype show that our model achieves better efficiency than the existing remote attestation scheme.

The automotive industry is experiencing a paradigm shift towards autonomous and connected vehicles. Coupled with the increasing usage and complexity of electrical and/or electronic systems, this introduces new safety and security risks. Encouragingly, the automotive industry has relatively well-known and standardised safety risk management practices, but security risk management is still in its infancy. In order to facilitate the derivation of security requirements and security measures for automotive embedded systems, we propose a specifically tailored risk assessment framework, and we demonstrate its viability with an industry use-case. Some of the key features are alignment with existing processes for functional safety, and usability for non-security specialists. The framework begins with a threat analysis to identify the assets, and threats to those assets. The following risk assessment process consists of an estimation of the threat level and of the impact level. This step utilises several existing standards and methodologies, with changes where necessary. Finally, a security level is estimated which is used to formulate high-level security requirements. The strong alignment with existing standards and processes should make this framework well-suited for the needs in the automotive industry.

Organizations rely on security experts to improve the security of their systems. These professionals use background knowledge and experience to align known threats and vulnerabilities before selecting mitigation options. The substantial depth of expertise in any one area (e.g., databases, networks, operating systems) precludes the possibility that an expert would have complete knowledge about all threats and vulnerabilities. To begin addressing this problem of distributed knowledge, we investigate the challenge of developing a security requirements rule base that mimics human expert reasoning to enable new decision-support systems. In this paper, we show how to collect relevant information from cyber security experts to enable the generation of: (1) interval type-2 fuzzy sets that capture intra- and inter-expert uncertainty around vulnerability levels; and (2) fuzzy logic rules underpinning the decision-making process within the requirements analysis. The proposed method relies on comparative ratings of security requirements in the context of concrete vignettes, providing a novel, interdisciplinary approach to knowledge generation for fuzzy logic systems. The proposed approach is tested by evaluating 52 scenarios with 13 experts to compare their assessments to those of the fuzzy logic decision support system. The initial results show that the system provides reliable assessments to the security analysts, in particular, generating more conservative assessments in 19% of the test scenarios compared to the experts’ ratings. 

Most augmented reality applications connect virtual information to anchors, i.e. physical places or objects, by using spatial overlays or proximity. However, for industrial use cases this is not always feasible because specific parts must remain fully visible in order to meet work or security requirements. In these situations virtual information must be displayed at alternative positions while connections to anchors must still be clearly recognizable. In our previous research we were the first to show that for simple scenes connection lines are most suitable for this. To extend these results to more complex environments, we conducted an experiment on the effects of visual interruptions in connection lines and incorrect occlusion. Completion time and subjective mental effort for search tasks were used as measures. Our findings confirm that also in 3D scenes with partial occlusion connection lines are preferable to connect virtual information with anchors if an assignment via overlay or close proximity is not feasible. The results further imply that neither incorrectly used depth cues nor missing parts of connection lines make a significant difference concerning completion time or subjective mental effort. For designers of industrial augmented reality applications this means that they can choose either visualization based on their needs.

Recent data breaches in domains such as healthcare, where confidentiality of data is crucial, indicate that misuse cases often originate from user errors rather than vulnerabilities in the technical (software or hardware) architecture. Current requirements engineering (RE) approaches determine what access control mechanisms are needed to protect sensitive resources. However, current RE approaches inadequately characterize how a user is expected to interact with others in relation to the relevant resources. Consequently, a requirements analyst cannot readily identify the vulnerabilities based on user interactions. We adopt social norms as a natural, formal means of characterizing user interactions wherein potential misuses map to norm violations. Our research goal is to help analysts identify misuse cases by systematically generating potential temporal enactments that violate formally stated social norms. We propose Nane: a formal framework for identifying misuse cases from norm enactments. We represent misuse cases formally, and propose a semiautomated process for identifying misuse cases based on norm enactments. We show that our process is sound and complete with respect to the stated norms. We discuss the expressiveness of our representation, and demonstrate how Nane enables monitoring of misuse cases via temporal reasoning.

The main objective of this research is to build upon existing cryptographic standards and web protocols to design an alternative multi-factor authentication cryptosystem for the web. It involves seed exchange to a software-based token through a login-protected Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL) tunnel, encrypted local storage through a password-protected keystore (BC UBER) with a strong key derivation function (PBEWithSHAANDTwofish-CBC), and offline generation of one-time passwords through the TOTP algorithm (IETF RFC 6239). Authentication occurs through the use of a shared secret (the seed) to verify the correctness of the one-time password used to authenticate. With the traditional use of username and password no longer wholly adequate for protecting online accounts, and with regulators worldwide toughening up security requirements (i.e. BSP 808, FFIEC), this research hopes to increase research effort on further development of cryptosystems involving multi-factor authentication.
 

Cloud computing is widely deployed to handle challenges such as big data processing and storage. Due to the outsourcing and sharing feature of cloud computing, security is one of the main concerns that hinders the end users to shift their businesses to the cloud. A lot of cryptographic techniques have been proposed to alleviate the data security issues in cloud computing, but most of these works focus on solving a specific security problem such as data sharing, comparison, searching, etc. At the same time, little efforts have been done on program security and formalization of the security requirements in the context of cloud computing. We propose a formal definition of the security of cloud computing, which captures the essence of the security requirements of both data and program. Analysis of some existing technologies under the proposed definition shows the effectiveness of the definition. We also give a simple look-up table based solution for secure cloud computing which satisfies the given definition. As FPGA uses look-up table as its main computation component, it is a suitable hardware platform for the proposed secure cloud computing scheme. So we use FPGAs to implement the proposed solution for k-means clustering algorithm, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
 

Despite the benefits offered by smart grids, energy producers, distributors and consumers are increasingly concerned about possible security and privacy threats. These threats typically manifest themselves at runtime as new usage scenarios arise and vulnerabilities are discovered. Adaptive security and privacy promise to address these threats by increasing awareness and automating prevention, detection and recovery from security and privacy requirements' failures at runtime by re-configuring system controls and perhaps even changing requirements. This paper discusses the need for adaptive security and privacy in smart grids by presenting some motivating scenarios. We then outline some research issues that arise in engineering adaptive security. We particularly scrutinize published reports by NIST on smart grid security and privacy as the basis for our discussions.

Very often in the software development life cycle, security is applied too late or important security aspects are overlooked. Although the use of security patterns is gaining popularity, the current state of security requirements patterns is such that there is not much in terms of a defining structure. To address this issue, we are working towards defining the important characteristics as well as the boundaries for security requirements patterns in order to make them more effective. By examining an existing general pattern format that describes how security patterns should be structured and comparing it to existing security requirements patterns, we are deriving characterizations and boundaries for security requirements patterns. From these attributes, we propose a defining format. We hope that these can reduce user effort in elicitation and specification of security requirements patterns.