Biblio
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.
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.
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.
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.
Data privacy and security is a leading concern for providers and customers of cloud computing, where Virtual Machines (VMs) can co-reside within the same underlying physical machine. Side channel attacks within multi-tenant virtualized cloud environments are an established problem, where attackers are able to monitor and exfiltrate data from co-resident VMs. Virtualization services have attempted to mitigate such attacks by preventing VM-to-VM interference on shared hardware by providing logical resource isolation between co-located VMs via an internal virtual network. However, such approaches are also insecure, with attackers capable of performing network channel attacks which bypass mitigation strategies using vectors such as ARP Spoofing, TCP/IP steganography, and DNS poisoning. In this paper we identify a new vulnerability within the internal cloud virtual network, showing that through a combination of TAP impersonation and mirroring, a malicious VM can successfully redirect and monitor network traffic of VMs co-located within the same physical machine. We demonstrate the feasibility of this attack in a prominent cloud platform - OpenStack - under various security requirements and system conditions, and propose countermeasures for mitigation.
Motivation: The security of any system is a direct consequence of stakeholders' decisions regarding security requirements. Such decisions are taken with varying degrees of expertise, and little is currently understood about how various demographics - security experts, general computer scientists, managers - approach security decisions and the strategies that underpin those decisions. What are the typical decision patterns, the consequences of such patterns and their impact on the security of the system in question? Nor is there any substantial understanding of how the strategies and decision patterns of these different groups contrast. Is security expertise necessarily an advantage when making security decisions in a given context? Answers to these questions are key to understanding the "how" and "why" behind security decision processes. The Game: In this talk1, we present a tabletop game: Decisions and Disruptions (D-D)2 that tasks a group of players with managing the security of a small utility company while facing a variety of threats. The game is kept short - 2 hours - and simple enough to be played without prior training. A cyber-physical infrastructure, depicted through a Lego\textregistered board, makes the game easy to understand and accessible to players from varying backgrounds and security expertise, without being too trivial a setting for security experts. Key insights: We played D-D with 43 players divided into homogeneous groups: 4 groups of security experts, 4 groups of nontechnical managers and 4 groups of general computer scientists. • Strategies: Security experts had a strong interest in advanced technological solutions and tended to neglect intelligence gathering, to their own detriment. Managers, too, were technology-driven and focused on data protection while neglecting human factors more than other groups. Computer scientists tended to balance human factors and intelligence gathering with technical solutions, and achieved the best results of the three demographics. • Decision Processes: Technical experience significantly changes the way players think. Teams with little technical experience had shallow, intuition-driven discussions with few concrete arguments. Technical teams, and the most experienced in particular, had much richer debates, driven by concrete scenarios, anecdotes from experience, and procedural thinking. Security experts showed a high confidence in their decisions - despite some of them having bad consequences - while the other groups tended to doubt their own skills - even when they were playing good games. • Patterns: A number of characteristic plays were identified, some good (balance between priorities, open-mindedness, and adapting strategies based on inputs that challenge one's pre-conceptions), some bad (excessive focus on particular issues, confidence in charismatic leaders), some ugly ("tunnel vision" syndrome by over-confident players). These patterns are documented in the full paper - showing the virtue of the positive ones, discouraging the negative ones, and inviting the readers to do their own introspection. Conclusion: Beyond the analysis of the security decisions of the three demographics, there is a definite educational and awareness-raising aspect to D-D (as noted consistently by players in all our subject groups). Game boxes will be brought to the conference for demonstration purposes, and the audience will be invited to experiment with D-D themselves, make their own decisions, and reflect on their own perception of security.
With the recent advances in information and communication technology, Web and Mobile Internet applications have become a part of our daily lives. These developments have also emerged Information Security concept due to the necessity of protecting information of institutions from Internet attackers. There are many security approaches to provide information security in Enterprise applications. However, using only one of these approaches may not be efficient enough to obtain security. This paper describes a Multi-Layered Framework of implementing two-factor and single sign-on authentication together. The proposed framework generates unique one-time passwords (OTP), which are used to authenticate application data. Nevertheless, using only OTP mechanism does not meet security requirements. Therefore, implementing a separate authentication application which has single sign-on capability is necessary.
Connected and automated vehicles aim to improve the comfort and the safety of the driver and passengers. To this end, car manufacturers continually improve actual standardized methods to ensure their customers safety, privacy, and vehicles security. However, these methods do not support fully autonomous vehicles, linkability and confusion threats. To address such gaps, we propose a systematic threat analysis and risk assessment framework, SARA, which comprises an improved threat model, a new attack method/asset map, the involvement of the attacker in the attack tree, and a new driving system observation metric. Finally, we demonstrate its feasibility in assessing risk with two use cases: Vehicle Tracking and Comfortable Emergency Brake Failure.
Design of anonymous authentication scheme is one of the most important challenges in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET). Most of the existing schemes have high computational and communication overhead and they do not meet security requirements. Recently, Azees et al. have introduced an Efficient Anonymous Authentication with Conditional Privacy-Preserving (EAAP) scheme for VANET and claimed that it is secure. In this paper, we show that this protocol is vulnerable against replay attack, impersonation attack and message modification attack. Also, we show that the messages sent by a vehicle are linkable. Therefore, an adversary can easily track the vehicles. In addition, it is shown that vehicles face with some problems when they enter in a new Trusted Authority (TA) range. As a solution, we propose a new authentication protocol which is more secure than EAAP protocol without increasing its computational and communication overhead.
The world is witnessing the emerging role of Internet of Things (IoT) as a technology that is transforming different industries, global community and its economy. Currently a plethora of interconnected smart devices have been deployed for diverse pervasive applications and services, and billions more are expected to be connected to the Internet in the near future. The potential benefits of IoT include improved quality of life, convenience, enhanced energy efficiency, and more productivity. Alongside these potential benefits, however, come increased security risks and potential for abuse. Arguably, this is partly because many IoT start-ups and electronics hobbyists lack security expertise, and some established companies do not make security a priority in their designs, and hence they produce IoT devices that are often ill-equipped in terms of security. In this paper, we discuss different IoT application areas, and identify security threats in IoT architecture. We consider security requirements and present typical security threats for each of the application domains. Finally, we present several possible security countermeasures, and introduce the IoT Hardware Platform Security Advisor (IoT-HarPSecA) framework, which is still under development. IoT-HarPSecA is aimed at facilitating the design and prototyping of secure IoT devices.