Biblio

Controllers for software defined networks (SDNs) are quickly maturing to offer network operators more intuitive programming frameworks and greater abstractions for network application development. Likewise, many security solutions now exist within SDN environments for detecting and blocking clients who violate network policies. However, many of these solutions stop at triggering the security measure and give little thought to amending it. As a consequence, once the violation is addressed, no clear path exists for reinstating the flagged client beyond having the network operator reset the controller or manually implement a state change via an external command. This presents a burden for the network and its clients and administrators. Hence, we present a security policy transition framework for revoking security measures in an SDN environment once said measures are activated.

Security isolation is a foundation of computing systems that enables resilience to different forms of attacks. This article seeks to understand existing security isolation techniques by systematically classifying different approaches and analyzing their properties. We provide a hierarchical classification structure for grouping different security isolation techniques. At the top level, we consider two principal aspects: mechanism and policy. Each aspect is broken down into salient dimensions that describe key properties. We break the mechanism into two dimensions, enforcement location and isolation granularity, and break the policy aspect down into three dimensions: policy generation, policy configurability, and policy lifetime. We apply our classification to a set of representative articles that cover a breadth of security isolation techniques and discuss tradeoffs among different design choices and limitations of existing approaches.

We describe the formalization of a correctness proof for a conflict detection algorithm for XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language). XACML is a standardized declarative access control policy language that is increasingly used in industry. In practice it is common for rule sets to grow large, and contain unintended errors, often due to conflicting rules. A conflict occurs in a policy when one rule permits a request and another denies that same request. Such errors can lead to serious risks involving both allowing access to an unauthorized user as well as denying access to someone who needs it. Removing conflicts is thus an important aspect of debugging policies, and the use of a verified algorithm provides the highest assurance in a domain where security is important. In this paper, we focus on several complex XACML constructs, including time ranges and integer intervals, as well as ways to combine any number of functions using the boolean operators and, or, and not. The latter are the most complex, and add significant expressive power to the language. We propose an algorithm to find conflicts and then use the Coq Proof Assistant to prove the algorithm correct. We develop a library of tactics to help automate the proof.

The Internet of Things(IoT) has become a popular technology, and various middleware has been proposed and developed for IoT systems. However, there have been few studies on the data management of IoT systems. In this paper, we consider graph database models for the data management of IoT systems because these models can specify relationships in a straightforward manner among entities such as devices, users, and information that constructs IoT systems. However, applying a graph database to the data management of IoT systems raises issues regarding distribution and security. For the former issue, we propose graph database operations integrated with REST APIs. For the latter, we extend a graph edge property by adding access protocol permissions and checking permissions using the APIs with authentication. We present the requirements for a use case scenario in addition to the features of a distributed graph database for IoT data management to solve the aforementioned issues, and implement a prototype of the graph database.

The development of cloud computing has brought a lot of advantages, such as reducing the hardware cost and a more convenient storage solution. Because of the convenient and cheap storage solution, a large number of users put their valuable data onto the cloud. There have been more and more outsourcing data security and privacy issues. Several schemes using attribute-based encryption (ABE) have been proposed in cloud computing outsourcing data access control; However, most of them have stubborn in complex access control policy. To implement scalable, flexible and fine-grained access control in cloud storage, this paper proposes an attribute-based solution with time restriction delegate by extending the Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE). This scheme not only realizes the scalability and fine-grained access control, but also gives a solution for the data delegate. Our delegate mechanism can let the users entrusted the data which in their visit range to others, and the ability to set a time limit. Finally, we prove the security of our scheme based on the security of the Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) by Bethencourt et al. and analyze its performance and computational complexity. Experiments for our scheme are implemented and the result shows that it is both efficient and flexible in dealing with access control for outsourced data in cloud computing.

Standardization and harmonization efforts have reached a consensus towards using a special-purpose Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) in upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. However, there are still several technical challenges with no conclusive answers; one such an important yet open challenge is the acquisition of short-term credentials, pseudonym: how should each vehicle interact with the VPKI, e.g., how frequently and for how long? Should each vehicle itself determine the pseudonym lifetime? Answering these questions is far from trivial. Each choice can affect both the user privacy and the system performance and possibly, as a result, its security. In this paper, we make a novel systematic effort to address this multifaceted question. We craft three generally applicable policies and experimentally evaluate the VPKI system performance, leveraging two large-scale mobility datasets. We consider the most promising, in terms of efficiency, pseudonym acquisition policies; we find that within this class of policies, the most promising policy in terms of privacy protection can be supported with moderate overhead. Moreover, in all cases, this work is the first to provide tangible evidence that the state-of-the-art VPKI can serve sizable areas or domain with modest computing resources.

Media streaming has largely dominated the Internet traffic and the trend will keep increasing in the next years. To efficiently distribute the media content, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has attracted many researchers. Since end users usually obtain content from indeterminate caches in ICN, the publisher cannot reinforce data security and access control depending on the caches. Hence, the ability of self-contained protection is important for the cached contents. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is considered the preferred solution to achieve this goal. However, the existing ABE schemes usually have problems regarding efficiency. The exponentiation in key generation and pairing operation in decryption respectively increases linearly with the number of attributes involved, which make it costly. In this paper, we propose an efficient key-policy ABE with fast key generation and decryption (FKP-ABE). In the key generation, we get rid of exponentiation and only require multiplications/divisions for each attribute in the access policy. And in the decryption, we reduce the pairing operations to a constant number, no matter how many attributes are used. The efficiency analysis indicates that our scheme has better performance than the existing KP-ABE schemes. Finally, we present an implementation framework that incorporates the proposed FKP-ABE with the ICN architecture.

Yamata-no-Orochi is an authentication and authorization infrastructure across multiple service domains and provides Internet services with unified authentication and authorization mechanisms. In this paper, Yamata-no-Orochi is incorporated into a video distribution system to verify its general versatility as a multi-domain authentication and authorization infrastructure for Internet services. This paper also reduces the authorization time of Yamata-no-Orochi to fulfill the processing time constrains of the video distribution system. The evaluation results show that all the authentication and authorization processes work correctly and the performance of Yamata-no-Orochi is practical for the video distribution system.

KP-ABE mechanism emerges as one of the most suitable security scheme for asymmetric encryption. It has been widely used to implement access control solutions. However, due to its expensive overhead, it is difficult to consider this cryptographic scheme in resource-limited networks, such as the IoT. As the cloud has become a key infrastructural support for IoT applications, it is interesting to exploit cloud resources to perform heavy operations. In this paper, a collaborative variant of KP-ABE named C-KP-ABE for cloud-based IoT applications is proposed. Our proposal is based on the use of computing power and storage capacities of cloud servers and trusted assistant nodes to run heavy operations. A performance analysis is conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex as designers integrate different functionalities into a single application for execution on heterogeneous hardware platforms. In this work we propose a system-level security approach in order to provide isolation of tasks without the need to trust a central authority at run-time. We discuss security requirements that can be found in complex embedded systems that use heterogeneous execution platforms, and by regulating memory access we create mechanisms that allow safe use of shared IP with direct memory access, as well as shared libraries. We also present a prototype Isolation Unit that checks memory transactions and allows for dynamic configuration of permissions.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing many IT ecosystems through offering scalable computing resources that are easy to configure, use and inter-connect. However, this model has always been viewed with some suspicion as it raises a wide range of security and privacy issues that need to be negotiated. This research focuses on the construction of a trust layer in cloud computing to build a trust relationship between cloud service providers and cloud users. In particular, we address the rise of container-based virtualisation has a weak isolation compared to traditional VMs because of the shared use of the OS kernel and system components. Therefore, we will build a trust layer to solve the issues of weaker isolation whilst maintaining the performance and scalability of the approach. This paper has two objectives. Firstly, we propose a security system to protect containers from other guests through the addition of a Role-based Access Control (RBAC) model and the provision of strict data protection and security. Secondly, we provide a stress test using isolation benchmarking tools to evaluate the isolation in containers in term of performance.

Hadoop has become increasingly popular as it rapidly processes data in parallel. Cloud computing gives reliability, flexibility, scalability, elasticity and cost saving to cloud users. Deploying Hadoop in cloud can benefit Hadoop users. Our evaluation exhibits that various internal cloud attacks can bypass current Hadoop security mechanisms, and compromised Hadoop components can be used to threaten overall Hadoop. It is urgent to improve compromise resilience, Hadoop can maintain a relative high security level when parts of Hadoop are compromised. Hadoop has two vulnerabilities that can dramatically impact its compromise resilience. The vulnerabilities are the overloaded authentication key, and the lack of fine-grained access control at the data access level. We developed a security enhancement for a public cloud-based Hadoop, named SEHadoop, to improve the compromise resilience through enhancing isolation among Hadoop components and enforcing least access privilege for Hadoop processes. We have implemented the SEHadoop model, and demonstrated that SEHadoop fixes the above vulnerabilities with minimal or no run-time overhead, and effectively resists related attacks.

In this paper a joint algorithm was designed to detect a variety of unauthorized access risks in multilevel hybrid cloud. First of all, the access history is recorded among different virtual machines in multilevel hybrid cloud using the global flow diagram. Then, the global flow graph is taken as auxiliary decision-making basis to design legitimacy detection algorithm based data access and is represented by formal representation, Finally the implement process was specified, and the algorithm can effectively detect operating against regulations such as simple unauthorized level across, beyond indirect unauthorized and other irregularities.

Privacy analysis is essential in the society. Data privacy preservation for access control, guaranteed service in wireless sensor networks are important parts. In programs' verification, we not only consider about these kinds of safety and liveness properties but some security policies like noninterference, and observational determinism which have been proposed as hyper properties. Fairness is widely applied in verification for concurrent systems, wireless sensor networks and embedded systems. This paper studies verification and analysis for proving security-relevant properties and hyper properties by proposing deductive proof rules under fairness requirements (constraints).

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates the annual cost from cyber crime to be more than \$400 billion. Most notable is the recent digital identity thefts that compromised millions of accounts. These attacks emphasize the security problems of using clonable static information. One possible solution is the use of a physical device known as a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF). PUFs can be used to create encryption keys, generate random numbers, or authenticate devices. While the concept shows promise, current PUF implementations are inherently problematic: inconsistent behavior, expensive, susceptible to modeling attacks, and permanent. Therefore, we propose a new solution by which an unclonable, dynamic digital identity is created between two communication endpoints such as mobile devices. This Physically Unclonable Digital ID (PUDID) is created by injecting a data scrambling PUF device at the data origin point that corresponds to a unique and matching descrambler/hardware authentication at the receiving end. This device is designed using macroscopic, intentional anomalies, making them inexpensive to produce. PUDID is resistant to cryptanalysis due to the separation of the challenge response pair and a series of hash functions. PUDID is also unique in that by combining the PUF device identity with a dynamic human identity, we can create true two-factor authentication. We also propose an alternative solution that eliminates the need for a PUF mechanism altogether by combining tamper resistant capabilities with a series of hash functions. This tamper resistant device, referred to as a Quasi-PUDID (Q-PUDID), modifies input data, using a black-box mechanism, in an unpredictable way. By mimicking PUF attributes, Q-PUDID is able to avoid traditional PUF challenges thereby providing high-performing physical identity assurance with or without a low performing PUF mechanism. Three different application scenarios with mobile devices for PUDID and Q-PUDI- have been analyzed to show their unique advantages over traditional PUFs and outline the potential for placement in a host of applications.

The term “Advanced Persistent Threat” refers to a well-organized, malicious group of people who launch stealthy attacks against computer systems of specific targets, such as governments, companies or military. The attacks themselves are long-lasting, difficult to expose and often use very advanced hacking techniques. Since they are advanced in nature, prolonged and persistent, the organizations behind them have to possess a high level of knowledge, advanced tools and competent personnel to execute them. The attacks are usually preformed in several phases - reconnaissance, preparation, execution, gaining access, information gathering and connection maintenance. In each of the phases attacks can be detected with different probabilities. There are several ways to increase the level of security of an organization in order to counter these incidents. First and foremost, it is necessary to educate users and system administrators on different attack vectors and provide them with knowledge and protection so that the attacks are unsuccessful. Second, implement strict security policies. That includes access control and restrictions (to information or network), protecting information by encrypting it and installing latest security upgrades. Finally, it is possible to use software IDS tools to detect such anomalies (e.g. Snort, OSSEC, Sguil).

This paper introduces a research agenda focusing on cybersecurity in the context of product lifecycle management. The paper discusses research directions on critical protection techniques, including protection techniques from insider threat, access control systems, secure supply chains and remote 3D printing, compliance techniques, and secure collaboration techniques. The paper then presents an overview of DBSAFE, a system for protecting data from insider threat.

Many cloud security complexities can be concerned as a result of its open system architecture. One of these complexities is multi-tenancy security issue. This paper discusses and addresses the most common public cloud security complexities focusing on Multi-Tenancy security issue. Multi-tenancy is one of the most important security challenges faced by public cloud services providers. Therefore, this paper presents a secure multi-tenancy architecture using authorization model Based on AAAS protocol. By utilizing cloud infrastructure, access control can be provided to various cloud information and services by our suggested authorization system. Each business can offer several cloud services. These cloud services can cooperate with other services which can be related to the same organization or different one. Moreover, these cooperation agreements are supported by our suggested system.

Information Technology experts cite security and privacy concerns as the major challenges in the adoption of cloud computing. On Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds, customers are faced with challenges of selecting service providers and evaluating security implementations based on their security needs and requirements. This study aims to enable cloud customers the ability to quantify their security requirements in order to identify critical areas in PaaS cloud architectures were security provisions offered by CSPs could be assessed. With the use of an adaptive security mapping matrix, the study uses a quantitative approach to presents findings of numeric data that shows critical architectures within the PaaS environment where security can be evaluated and security controls assessed to meet these security requirements. The matrix can be adapted across different types of PaaS cloud models based on individual security requirements and service level objectives identified by PaaS cloud customers.

Easy sharing files in public network that is intended only for certain people often resulting in the leaking of sharing folders or files and able to be read also by others who are not authorized. Secure data is one of the most challenging issues in data sharing systems. Here, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is a reliable asymmetric encryption mechanism which deals with secure data and used for data encryption. It is not necessary encrypted to one particular user, but recipient is only able to decrypt if and only if the attribute set of his private key match with the specified policy in the ciphertext. In this paper, we propose a secure data exchange using CP-ABE with authentication feature. The data is attribute-based encrypted to satisfy confidentiality feature and authenticated to satisfy data authentication simultaneously.

The Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security (HotSoS), is a research event centered on the Science of Security (SoS). Following a successful invitational SoS Community Meeting in December 2012, HotSoS 2014 was the first open research event in what we expect will be a continuing series of such events. The key motivation behind developing a Science of Security is to address the fundamental problems of cybersecurity in a principled manner. Security has been intensively studied, but a lot of previous research emphasizes the engineering of specific solutions without first developing the scientific understanding of the problem domain. All too often, security research conveys the flavor of identifying specific threats and removing them in an apparently ad hoc manner. The motivation behind the nascent Science of Security is to understand how computing systems are architected, built, used, and maintained with a view to understanding and addressing security challenges systematically across their life cycle. In particular, two features distinguish the Science of Security from previous research programs on cybersecurity. Scope. The Science of Security considers not just computational artifacts but also incorporates the human, social, and organizational aspects of computing within its purview. Approach. The Science of Security takes a decidedly scientific approach, based on the understanding of empirical evaluation and theoretical foundations as developed in the natural and social sciences, but adapted as appropriate for the "artificial science" (paraphrasing Herb Simon's term) that is computing.

Lo et al. (2011) proposed an efficient key assignment scheme for access control in a large leaf class hierarchy where the alternations in leaf classes are more frequent than in non-leaf classes in the hierarchy. Their scheme is based on the public-key cryptosystem and hash function where operations like modular exponentiations are very much costly compared to symmetric-key encryptions and decryptions, and hash computations. Their scheme performs better than the previously proposed schemes. However, in this paper, we show that Lo et al.’s scheme fails to preserve the forward security property where a security class can also derive the secret keys of its successor classes ’s even after deleting the security class  from the hierarchy. We aim to propose a new key management scheme for dynamic access control in a large leaf class hierarchy, which makes use of symmetric-key cryptosystem and one-way hash function. We show that our scheme requires significantly less storage and computational overheads as compared to Lo et al.’s scheme and other related schemes. Through the informal and formal security analysis, we further show that our scheme is secure against all possible attacks including the forward security. In addition, our scheme supports efficiently dynamic access control problems compared to Lo et al.’s scheme and other related schemes. Thus, higher security along with low storage and computational costs make our scheme more suitable for practical applications compared to other schemes.

Project documentation often contains security-relevant statements that are indicative of the security requirements of a system. However these statements may not be explicitly specified or straightforward to locate. At best, requirements analysts manually extract applicable security requirements from project documents. However, security requirements that are not explicitly stated may not be considered during implementation. The goal of this research is to aid requirements analysts in generating security requirements through identifying securityrelevant statements in project documentation and providing context-specific templates to generate security requirements. First, we identify the most prevalent security objectives from software security literature. To identify security-relevant statements in project documentation, we propose a tool-based process to classify statements as related to zero or more security objectives. We then develop a set of context-specific templates to help translate the security objectives of each statement into explicit sets of security functional requirements. We evaluate our process on six documents from the electronic healthcare software industry, identifying 46% of statements as implicitly or explicitly related to security. Our classification approach identified security objectives with a precision of .82 and recall of .79. From our total set of classified statements, we extracted 16 context-specific templates that identify 41 reusable security requirements.