Biblio

Substantial portions of attacks on the security of enterprises are perpetrated by Insiders having authorized privileges. Thus insider threat and attack detection is an important aspect of Security management. In the published literature, efforts are on to model the insider threats based on the behavioral traits of employees. The psycho-social behaviors are hard to encode in the software systems. Also, in some cases, there are privacy issues involved. In this paper, the human and non-human agents in a system are described in a novel unified model. The enterprise is described as an automaton and its states are classified secure, safe, unsafe and compromised. The insider agents and threats are modeled on the basis of the automaton and the model is validated using a case study.

The lack of standardization of the terms insider and insider threat has been a noted problem for researchers in the insider threat field. This paper describes the investigation of 42 different definitions of the terms insider and insider threat, with the goal of better understanding the current conceptual model of insider threat and facilitating communication in the research community.

Insider threats are one of the most challenging issues in the world of computer networks. Now a day, most of the companies are relying on cloud services to get scalable data services and to reduce cost. The inclusion of cloud environment has spread the canvas for insider threats because cloud service providers are also there in addition to the organization that outsourced for cloud services. In this paper, multiple existing approaches to handle the insider threats in cloud environment have been investigated and analyzed thoroughly. The comparison of these techniques depicts which better approaches in the paradigm of cloud computing exist.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has standardized an access control approach, Next Generation Access Control (NGAC), that enables simultaneous instantiation of multiple access control policies. For large complex enterprises this is critical to limiting the authorized access of insiders. However, the specifications describe the required access control capabilities but not the related algorithms. While appropriate, this leave open the important question as to whether or not NGAC is scalable. Existing cubic reference implementations indicate that it does not. For example, the primary NGAC reference implementation took several minutes to simply display the set of files accessible to a user on a moderately sized system. To solve this problem we provide an efficient access control decision algorithm, reducing the overall complexity from cubic to linear. Our other major contribution is to provide a novel mechanism for administrators and users to review allowed access rights. We provide an interface that appears to be a simple file directory hierarchy but in reality is an automatically generated structure abstracted from the underlying access control graph that works with any set of simultaneously instantiated access control policies. Our work thus provides the first efficient implementation of NGAC while enabling user privilege review through a novel visualization approach. These capabilities help limit insider access to information (and thereby limit information leakage) by enabling the efficient simultaneous instantiation of multiple access control policies.