Biblio

With the increasing use of mobile phones in contemporary society, more and more networked computers are connected to each other. This has brought along security issues. To solve these issues, both research and development communities are trying to build more secure software. However, there is the question that how the secure software is defined and how the security could be measured. In this paper, we study this problem by studying what kinds of security measurement tools (i.e. metrics) are available, and what these tools and metrics reveal about the security of software. As the result of the study, we noticed that security verification activities fall into two main categories, evaluation and assurance. There exist 34 metrics for measuring the security, from which 29 are assurance metrics and 5 are evaluation metrics. Evaluating and studying these metrics, lead us to the conclusion that the general quality of the security metrics are not in a satisfying level that could be suitably used in daily engineering work flows. They have both theoretical and practical issues that require further research, and need to be improved.

Cloud computing is a wide-spread technology that enables the enterprises to provide services to their customers with a lower cost, higher performance, better availability and scalability. However, privacy and security in cloud computing has always been a major challenge to service providers and a concern to its users. Trusted computing has led its way in securing the cloud computing and virtualized environment, during the past decades. In this paper, first we study virtualized trusted platform modules and integration of vTPM in hypervisor-based virtualization. Then we propose two architectural solutions for integrating the vTPM in container-based virtualization model.

With the advancement of Internet in Things (IoT) more and more "things" are connected to each other through the Internet. Due to the fact that the collected information may contain personal information of the users, it is very important to ensure the security of the devices in IoT. Diversification is a promising technique that protects the software and devices from harmful attacks and malware by making interfaces unique in each separate system. In this paper we apply diversification on the interfaces of IoT operating systems. To this aim, we introduce the diversification in post-compilation and linking phase of the software life-cycle, by shuffling the order of the linked objects while preserving the semantics of the code. This approach successfully prevents malicious exploits from producing adverse effects in the system. Besides shuffling, we also apply library symbol diversification method, and construct needed support for it e.g. into the dynamic loading phase. Besides studying and discussing memory layout shuffling and symbol diversification as a security measures for IoT operating systems, we provide practical implementations for these schemes for Thingsee OS and Raspbian operating systems and test these solutions to show the feasibility of diversification in IoT environments.

Smart Spaces are composed of heterogeneous sensors and devices that collect and share information. This information may contain personal information of the users. Thus, securing the data and preserving the privacy are of paramount importance. In this paper, we propose techniques for information security and privacy protection for Smart Spaces based on the Smart-M3 platform. We propose a) a security framework, and b) a context-aware role-based access control scheme. We model our access control scheme using ontological techniques and Web Ontology Language (OWL), and implement it via CLIPS rules. To evaluate the efficiency of our access control scheme, we measure the time it takes to check the access rights of the access requests. The results demonstrate that the highest response time is approximately 0.2 seconds in a set of 100000 triples. We conclude that the proposed access control scheme produces low overhead and is therefore, an efficient approach for Smart Spaces.