Biblio

Filters: Keyword is capabilities  [Clear All Filters]
2022-02-04
Al-Turkistani, Hilalah F., Aldobaian, Samar, Latif, Rabia.  2021.  Enterprise Architecture Frameworks Assessment: Capabilities, Cyber Security and Resiliency Review. 2021 1st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics (CAIDA). :79–84.

Recent technological advancement demands organizations to have measures in place to manage their Information Technology (IT) systems. Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (EAF) offer companies an efficient technique to manage their IT systems aligning their business requirements with effective solutions. As a result, experts have developed multiple EAF's such as TOGAF, Zachman, MoDAF, DoDAF, SABSA to help organizations to achieve their objectives by reducing the costs and complexity. These frameworks however, concentrate mostly on business needs lacking holistic enterprise-wide security practices, which may cause enterprises to be exposed for significant security risks resulting financial loss. This study focuses on evaluating business capabilities in TOGAF, NIST, COBIT, MoDAF, DoDAF, SABSA, and Zachman, and identify essential security requirements in TOGAF, SABSA and COBIT19 frameworks by comparing their resiliency processes, which helps organization to easily select applicable framework. The study shows that; besides business requirements, EAF need to include precise cybersecurity guidelines aligning EA business strategies. Enterprises now need to focus more on building resilient approach, which is beyond of protection, detection and prevention. Now enterprises should be ready to withstand against the cyber-attacks applying relevant cyber resiliency approach improving the way of dealing with impacts of cybersecurity risks.

2019-10-28
Withers, Alex, Bockelman, Brian, Weitzel, Derek, Brown, Duncan, Gaynor, Jeff, Basney, Jim, Tannenbaum, Todd, Miller, Zach.  2018.  SciTokens: Capability-Based Secure Access to Remote Scientific Data. Proceedings of the Practice and Experience on Advanced Research Computing. :24:1–24:8.
The management of security credentials (e.g., passwords, secret keys) for computational science workflows is a burden for scientists and information security officers. Problems with credentials (e.g., expiration, privilege mismatch) cause workflows to fail to fetch needed input data or store valuable scientific results, distracting scientists from their research by requiring them to diagnose the problems, re-run their computations, and wait longer for their results. In this paper, we introduce SciTokens, open source software to help scientists manage their security credentials more reliably and securely. We describe the SciTokens system architecture, design, and implementation addressing use cases from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) projects. We also present our integration with widely-used software that supports distributed scientific computing, including HTCondor, CVMFS, and XrootD. SciTokens uses IETF-standard OAuth tokens for capability-based secure access to remote scientific data. The access tokens convey the specific authorizations needed by the workflows, rather than general-purpose authentication impersonation credentials, to address the risks of scientific workflows running on distributed infrastructure including NSF resources (e.g., LIGO Data Grid, Open Science Grid, XSEDE) and public clouds (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure). By improving the interoperability and security of scientific workflows, SciTokens 1) enables use of distributed computing for scientific domains that require greater data protection and 2) enables use of more widely distributed computing resources by reducing the risk of credential abuse on remote systems.
2017-07-11
Darya Melicher(Kurilova), Yangqingwei Shi, Alex Potanin, Jonathan Aldrich.  2017.  A Capability-Based Module System for Authority Control. European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP).

The principle of least authority states that each component of the system should be given authority to access only the information and resources that it needs for its operation. This principle is fundamental to the secure design of software systems, as it helps to limit an application’s attack surface and to isolate vulnerabilities and faults. Unfortunately, current programming languages do not provide adequate help in controlling the authority of application modules, an issue that is particularly acute in the case of untrusted third-party extensions. In this paper, we present a language design that facilitates controlling the authority granted to each application module. The key technical novelty of our approach is that modules are firstclass, statically typed capabilities. First-class modules are essentially objects, and so we formalize our module system by translation into an object calculus and prove that the core calculus is typesafe and authority-safe. Unlike prior formalizations, our work defines authority non-transitively, allowing engineers to reason about software designs that use wrappers to provide an attenuated version of a more powerful capability. Our approach allows developers to determine a module’s authority by examining the capabilities passed as module arguments when the module is created, or delegated to the module later during execution. The type system facilitates this by identifying which objects provide capabilities to sensitive resources, and by enabling security architects to examine the capabilities passed into and out of a module based only on the module’s interface, without needing to examine the module’s implementation code. An implementation of the module system and illustrative examples in the Wyvern programming language suggest that our approach can be a practical way to control module authority.

2017-05-30
Asmussen, Nils, Völp, Marcus, Nöthen, Benedikt, Härtig, Hermann, Fettweis, Gerhard.  2016.  M3: A Hardware/Operating-System Co-Design to Tame Heterogeneous Manycores. Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. :189–203.

In the last decade, the number of available cores increased and heterogeneity grew. In this work, we ask the question whether the design of the current operating systems (OSes) is still appropriate if these trends continue and lead to abundantly available but heterogeneous cores, or whether it forces a fundamental rethinking of how systems are designed. We argue that: 1. hiding heterogeneity behind a common hardware interface unifies, to a large extent, the control and coordination of cores and accelerators in the OS, 2. isolating at the network-on-chip rather than with processor features (like privileged mode, memory management unit, ...), allows running untrusted code on arbitrary cores, and 3. providing OS services via protocols over the network-on-chip, instead of via system calls, makes them accessible to arbitrary types of cores as well. In summary, this turns accelerators into first-class citizens and enables a single and convenient programming environment for all cores without the need to trust any application. In this paper, we introduce network-on-chip-level isolation, present the design of our microkernel-based OS, M3, and the common hardware interface, and evaluate the performance of our prototype in comparison to Linux. A bit surprising, without using accelerators, M3 outperforms Linux in some application-level benchmarks by more than a factor of five.

2017-05-22
Kurilova, Darya, Potanin, Alex, Aldrich, Jonathan.  2016.  Modules in Wyvern: Advanced Control over Security and Privacy. Proceedings of the Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security. :68–68.

In today's systems, restricting the authority of untrusted code is difficult because, by default, code has the same authority as the user running it. Object capabilities are a promising way to implement the principle of least authority, but being too low-level and fine-grained, take away many conveniences provided by module systems. We present a module system design that is capability-safe, yet preserves most of the convenience of conventional module systems. We demonstrate how to ensure key security and privacy properties of a program as a mode of use of our module system. Our authority safety result formally captures the role of mutable state in capability-based systems and uses a novel non-transitive notion of authority, which allows us to reason about authority restriction: the encapsulation of a stronger capability inside a weaker one.

2015-04-30
Barclay, C..  2014.  Sustainable security advantage in a changing environment: The Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (CM2). ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference: Living in a converged world - Impossible without standards?, Proceedings of the 2014. :275-282.

With the rapid advancement in technology and the growing complexities in the interaction of these technologies and networks, it is even more important for countries and organizations to gain sustainable security advantage. Security advantage refers to the ability to manage and respond to threats and vulnerabilities with a proactive security posture. This is accomplished through effectively planning, managing, responding to and recovering from threats and vulnerabilities. However not many organizations and even countries, especially in the developing world, have been able to equip themselves with the necessary and sufficient know-how or ability to integrate knowledge and capabilities to achieve security advantage within their environment. Having a structured set of requirements or indicators to aid in progressively attaining different levels of maturity and capabilities is one important method to determine the state of cybersecurity readiness. The research introduces the Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (CM2), a 6-step process of progressive development of cybersecurity maturity and knowledge integration that ranges from a state of limited awareness and application of security controls to pervasive optimization of the protection of critical assets.

2015-05-06
Barclay, C..  2014.  Sustainable security advantage in a changing environment: The Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (CM2). ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference: Living in a converged world - Impossible without standards?, Proceedings of the 2014. :275-282.

With the rapid advancement in technology and the growing complexities in the interaction of these technologies and networks, it is even more important for countries and organizations to gain sustainable security advantage. Security advantage refers to the ability to manage and respond to threats and vulnerabilities with a proactive security posture. This is accomplished through effectively planning, managing, responding to and recovering from threats and vulnerabilities. However not many organizations and even countries, especially in the developing world, have been able to equip themselves with the necessary and sufficient know-how or ability to integrate knowledge and capabilities to achieve security advantage within their environment. Having a structured set of requirements or indicators to aid in progressively attaining different levels of maturity and capabilities is one important method to determine the state of cybersecurity readiness. The research introduces the Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (CM2), a 6-step process of progressive development of cybersecurity maturity and knowledge integration that ranges from a state of limited awareness and application of security controls to pervasive optimization of the protection of critical assets.
 

2015-05-05
Blankstein, A., Freedman, M.J..  2014.  Automating Isolation and Least Privilege in Web Services. Security and Privacy (SP), 2014 IEEE Symposium on. :133-148.

In many client-facing applications, a vulnerability in any part can compromise the entire application. This paper describes the design and implementation of Passe, a system that protects a data store from unintended data leaks and unauthorized writes even in the face of application compromise. Passe automatically splits (previously shared-memory-space) applications into sandboxed processes. Passe limits communication between those components and the types of accesses each component can make to shared storage, such as a backend database. In order to limit components to their least privilege, Passe uses dynamic analysis on developer-supplied end-to-end test cases to learn data and control-flow relationships between database queries and previous query results, and it then strongly enforces those relationships. Our prototype of Passe acts as a drop-in replacement for the Django web framework. By running eleven unmodified, off-the-shelf applications in Passe, we demonstrate its ability to provide strong security guarantees-Passe correctly enforced 96% of the applications' policies-with little additional overhead. Additionally, in the web-specific setting of the prototype, we also mitigate the cross-component effects of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by combining browser HTML5 sandboxing techniques with our automatic component separation.