Biblio

Secure by design is an approach to developing secure software systems from the ground up. In such approach, the alternate security tactics are first thought, among them, the best are selected and enforced by the architecture design, and then used as guiding principles for developers. Thus, design flaws in the architecture of a software system mean that successful attacks could result in enormous consequences. Therefore, secure by design shifts the main focus of software assurance from finding security bugs to identifying architectural flaws in the design. Current research in software security has been neglecting vulnerabilities which are caused by flaws in a software architecture design and/or deteriorations of the implementation of the architectural decisions. In this paper, we present the concept of Common Architectural Weakness Enumeration (CAWE), a catalog which enumerates common types of vulnerabilities rooted in the architecture of a software and provides mitigation techniques to address them. The CAWE catalog organizes the architectural flaws according to known security tactics. We developed an interactive web-based solution which helps designers and developers explore this catalog based on architectural choices made in their project. CAWE catalog contains 224 weaknesses related to security architecture. Through this catalog, we aim to promote the awareness of security architectural flaws and stimulate the security design thinking of developers, software engineers, and architects.

Utility networks are part of every nation's critical infrastructure, and their protection is now seen as a high priority objective. In this paper, we propose a threat awareness architecture for critical infrastructures, which we believe will raise security awareness and increase resilience in utility networks. We first describe an investigation of trends and threats that may impose security risks in utility networks. This was performed on the basis of a viewpoint approach that is capable of identifying technical and non-technical issues (e.g., behaviour of humans). The result of our analysis indicated that utility networks are affected strongly by technological trends, but that humans comprise an important threat to them. This provided evidence and confirmed that the protection of utility networks is a multi-variable problem, and thus, requires the examination of information stemming from various viewpoints of a network. In order to accomplish our objective, we propose a systematic threat awareness architecture in the context of a resilience strategy, which ultimately aims at providing and maintaining an acceptable level of security and safety in critical infrastructures. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate partially via a case study the application of the proposed threat awareness architecture, where we examine the potential impact of attacks in the context of social engineering in a European utility company.

In the era of Big Data, software systems can be affected by its growing complexity, both with respect to functional and non-functional requirements. As more and more people use software applications over the web, the ability to recognize if some of this traffic is malicious or legitimate is a challenge. The traffic load of security controllers, as well as the complexity of security rules to detect attacks can grow to levels where current solutions may not suffice. In this work, we propose a hierarchical distributed architecture for security control in order to partition responsibility and workload among many security controllers. In addition, our architecture proposes a more simplified way of defining security rules to allow security to be enforced on an operational level, rather than a development level.

Access control is one of the most challenging issues in Cloud environment, it must ensure data confidentiality through enforced and flexible access policies. The revocation is an important task of the access control process, generally it consists on banishing some roles from the users. Attribute-based encryption is a promising cryptographic method which provides the fine-grained access, which makes it very useful in case of group sharing applications. This solution has initially been developed on a central authority model. Later, it has been extended to a multi-authority model which is more convenient and more reliable. However, the revocation problem is still the major challenge of this approach. There have been few proposed revocation solutions for the Multi-authority scheme and these solutions suffer from the lack of efficiency. In this paper, we propose an access control mechanism on a multi-authority architecture with an immediate and efficient attributes' or users' revocation. The proposed scheme uses decentralized CP-ABE to provide flexible and fine-grained access. Our solution provides collusion resistance, prevents security degradations, supports scalability and does not require keys' redistribution.

Summary form only given. Strong light-matter coupling has been recently successfully explored in the GHz and THz [1] range with on-chip platforms. New and intriguing quantum optical phenomena have been predicted in the ultrastrong coupling regime [2], when the coupling strength Ω becomes comparable to the unperturbed frequency of the system ω. We recently proposed a new experimental platform where we couple the inter-Landau level transition of an high-mobility 2DEG to the highly subwavelength photonic mode of an LC meta-atom [3] showing very large Ω/ωc = 0.87. Our system benefits from the collective enhancement of the light-matter coupling which comes from the scaling of the coupling Ω ∝ √n, were n is the number of optically active electrons. In our previous experiments [3] and in literature [4] this number varies from 104-103 electrons per meta-atom. We now engineer a new cavity, resonant at 290 GHz, with an extremely reduced effective mode surface Seff = 4 × 10-14 m2 (FE simulations, CST), yielding large field enhancements above 1500 and allowing to enter the few (\textbackslashtextless;100) electron regime. It consist of a complementary metasurface with two very sharp metallic tips separated by a 60 nm gap (Fig.1(a, b)) on top of a single triangular quantum well. THz-TDS transmission experiments as a function of the applied magnetic field reveal strong anticrossing of the cavity mode with linear cyclotron dispersion. Measurements for arrays of only 12 cavities are reported in Fig.1(c). On the top horizontal axis we report the number of electrons occupying the topmost Landau level as a function of the magnetic field. At the anticrossing field of B=0.73 T we measure approximately 60 electrons ultra strongly coupled (Ω/ω- \textbackslashtextbar\textbackslashtextbar

When clients interact with a cloud-based service, they expect certain levels of quality of service guarantees. These are expressed as security and privacy policies, interaction authorization policies, and service performance policies among others. The main security challenge in a cloud-based service environment, typically modeled using service-oriented architecture (SOA), is that it is difficult to trust all services in a service composition. In addition, the details of the services involved in an end-to-end service invocation chain are usually not exposed to the clients. The complexity of the SOA services and multi-tenancy in the cloud environment leads to a large attack surface. In this paper we propose a novel approach for end-to-end security and privacy in cloud-based service orchestrations, which uses a service activity monitor to audit activities of services in a domain. The service monitor intercepts interactions between a client and services, as well as among services, and provides a pluggable interface for different modules to analyze service interactions and make dynamic decisions based on security policies defined over the service domain. Experiments with a real-world service composition scenario demonstrate that the overhead of monitoring is acceptable for real-time operation of Web services.

To overcome the current cybersecurity challenges of protecting our cyberspace and applications, we present an innovative cloud-based architecture to offer resilient Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) as a cloud service that we refer to as resilient DDDAS as a Service (rDaaS). This architecture integrates Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and DDDAS paradigms to offer the next generation of resilient and agile DDDAS-based cyber applications, particularly convenient for critical applications such as Battle and Crisis Management applications. Using the cloud infrastructure to offer resilient DDDAS routines and applications, large scale DDDAS applications can be developed by users from anywhere and by using any device (mobile or stationary) with the Internet connectivity. The rDaaS provides transformative capabilities to achieve superior situation awareness (i.e., assessment, visualization, and understanding), mission planning and execution, and resilient operations.

Federated cloud networks are formed by federating virtual network segments from different clouds, e.g. in a hybrid cloud, into a single federated network. Such networks should be protected with a global federated cloud network security policy. The availability of network function virtualisation and service function chaining in cloud platforms offers an opportunity for implementing and enforcing global federated cloud network security policies. In this paper we describe an approach for enforcing global security policies in federated cloud networks. The approach relies on a service manifest that specifies the global network security policy. From this manifest configurations of the security functions for the different clouds of the federation are generated. This enables automated deployment and configuration of network security functions across the different clouds. The approach is illustrated with a case study where communications between trusted and untrusted clouds, e.g. public clouds, are encrypted. The paper discusses future work on implementing this architecture for the OpenStack cloud platform with the service function chaining API.

Blockchain is an emerging technology for decentralized and transactional data sharing across a large network of untrusted participants. It enables new forms of distributed software architectures, where components can find agreements on their shared states without trusting a central integration point or any particular participating components. Considering the blockchain as a software connector helps make explicitly important architectural considerations on the resulting performance and quality attributes (for example, security, privacy, scalability and sustainability) of the system. Based on our experience in several projects using blockchain, in this paper we provide rationales to support the architectural decision on whether to employ a decentralized blockchain as opposed to other software solutions, like traditional shared data storage. Additionally, we explore specific implications of using the blockchain as a software connector including design trade-offs regarding quality attributes.

Today, the interplay of security design and architecting is still poorly understood and architects lack knowledge about security and architectural security design. Yet, architectural knowledge on security design and its impact on other architectural properties is essential for making right decisions in architecture design. Knowledge is covered within solutions such as architectural patterns, tactics, and tools. Sharing it including the experience other architects gained using these solutions would enable better reuse of security solutions. In this paper, we present a repository for security solutions that supports architectural decisions including quality goal trade-offs. Its metamodel was adapted to special demands of security as a quality goal. The repository supports architecture decisions not only through populating approved solutions but through a recommender system that documents knowledge and experiences of architecture and security experts. We provide a case study to illustrate the repository's features and its application during architecture design.

Security Patterns and Architectural Tactics are two well-known techniques for designing secure software systems. There is little or no empirical evidence on their relative effectiveness for security threats mitigation. This study presents MUA (Misuse activities + Patterns), an extension of misuse activities that incorporates patterns, and reports on a controlled comparison of this method that incorporate these techniques for threat mitigation with regard to MAST (Methodology for Applying Security Tactics) which already incorporates tactics. A simple Tsunami Alert System design was analyzed and modified by 40 undergraduate students, and significant difference was found for security threats mitigation (averaging 3.0 for Patterns versus 1.9 for Tactics, in a 1-to-5 scale). This result is contrary to previous results with professional subjects, leading us to believe that novices benefit more of detailed advice than of high-level concepts.

The purpose of this research is to propose architecture-driven, penetration testing equipped with a software reverse and forward engineering process. Although the importance of architectural risk analysis has been emphasized in software security, no methodology is shown to answer how to discover the architecture and abuse cases of a given insecure legacy system and how to modernize it to a secure target system. For this purpose, we propose an architecture-driven penetration testing methodology: 4+1 architectural views of the given insecure legacy system, documented to discover program paths for vulnerabilities through a reverse engineering process. Then, vulnerabilities are identified by using the discovered architecture abuse cases and countermeasures are proposed on identified vulnerabilities. As a case study, a telecommunication company's Identity Access Management (IAM) system is used for discovering its software architecture, identifying the vulnerabilities of its architecture, and providing possible countermeasures. Our empirical results show that functional suggestions would be relatively easier to follow up and less time-consuming work to fix; however, architectural suggestions would be more complicated to follow up, even though it would guarantee better security and take full advantage of OAuth 2.0 supporting communities.

The digital forensics refers to the application of scientific techniques in investigation of a crime, specifically to identify or validate involvement of some suspect in an activity leading towards that crime. Network forensics particularly deals with the monitoring of network traffic with an aim to trace some suspected activity from normal traffic or to identify some abnormal pattern in the traffic that may give clue towards some attack. Network forensics, quite valuable phenomenon in investigation process, presents certain challenges including problems in accessing network devices of cloud architecture, handling large amount network traffic, and rigorous processing required to analyse the huge volume of data, of which large proportion may prove to be irrelevant later on. Cloud Computing technology offers services to its clients remotely from a shared pool of resources, as per clients customized requirement, any time, from anywhere. Cloud Computing has attained tremendous popularity recently, leading to its vast and rapid deployment, however Privacy and Security concerns have also increased in same ratio, since data and application is outsourced to a third party. Security concerns about cloud architecture have come up as the prime barrier hindering the major shift of industry towards cloud model, despite significant advantages of cloud architecture. Cloud computing architecture presents aggravated and specific challenges in the network forensics. In this paper, I have reviewed challenges and issues faced in conducting network forensics particularly in the cloud computing environment. The study covers limitations that a network forensic expert may confront during investigation in cloud environment. I have categorized challenges presented to network forensics in cloud computing into various groups. Challenges in each group can be handled appropriately by either Forensic experts, Cloud service providers or Forensic tools whereas leftover challenges are declared as be- ond the control.

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.

Based on the analysis relationships of challenger and attestation in remote attestation process, we propose a dynamic remote attestation model based on concerns. By combines the trusted root and application of dynamic credible monitoring module, Convert the Measurement for all load module of integrity measurement architecture into the Attestation of the basic computing environments, dynamic credible monitoring module, and request service software module. Discuss the rationality of the model. The model used Merkel hash tree to storage applications software integrity metrics, both to protect the privacy of the other party application software, and also improves the efficiency of remote attestation. Experimental prototype system shows that the model can verify the dynamic behavior of the software, to make up for the lack of static measure.

The importance and potential advantages with a comprehensive product architecture description are well described in the literature. However, developing such a description takes additional resources, and it is difficult to maintain consistency with evolving implementations. This paper presents an approach and industrial experience which is based on architecture recovery from source code at truck manufacturer Scania CV AB. The extracted representation of the architecture is presented in several views and verified on CAN signal level. Lessons learned are discussed.
 

Using heterogeneous clouds has been considered to improve performance of big-data analytics for healthcare platforms. However, the problem of the delay when transferring big-data over the network needs to be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare existing cloud computing environments (PaaS, IaaS) in order to implement middleware services. Understanding the differences and similarities between cloud technologies will help in the interconnection of healthcare platforms. The paper provides a general overview of the techniques and interfaces for cloud computing middleware services, and proposes a cloud architecture for healthcare. Cloud middleware enables heterogeneous devices to act as data sources and to integrate data from other healthcare platforms, but specific APIs need to be developed. Furthermore, security and management problems need to be addressed, given the heterogeneous nature of the communication and computing environment. The present paper fills a gap in the electronic healthcare register literature by providing an overview of cloud computing middleware services and standardized interfaces for the integration with medical devices.

This paper presents on-going research to define the basic models and architecture patterns for federated access control in heterogeneous (multi-provider) multi-cloud and inter-cloud environment. The proposed research contributes to the further definition of Intercloud Federation Framework (ICFF) which is a part of the general Intercloud Architecture Framework (ICAF) proposed by authors in earlier works. ICFF attempts to address the interoperability and integration issues in provisioning on-demand multi-provider multi-domain heterogeneous cloud infrastructure services. The paper describes the major inter-cloud federation scenarios that in general involve two types of federations: customer-side federation that includes federation between cloud based services and customer campus or enterprise infrastructure, and provider-side federation that is created by a group of cloud providers to outsource or broker their resources when provisioning services to customers. The proposed federated access control model uses Federated Identity Management (FIDM) model that can be also supported by the trusted third party entities such as Cloud Service Broker (CSB) and/or trust broker to establish dynamic trust relations between entities without previously existing trust. The research analyses different federated identity management scenarios, defines the basic architecture patterns and the main components of the distributed federated multi-domain Authentication and Authorisation infrastructure.

Shared resources are an essential part of cloud computing. Virtualization and multi-tenancy provide a number of advantages for increasing resource utilization and for providing on demand elasticity. However, these cloud features also raise many security concerns related to cloud computing resources. In this paper, we propose an architecture and approach for leveraging the virtualization technology at the core of cloud computing to perform intrusion detection security using hypervisor performance metrics. Through the use of virtual machine performance metrics gathered from hypervisors, such as packets transmitted/received, block device read/write requests, and CPU utilization, we demonstrate and verify that suspicious activities can be profiled without detailed knowledge of the operating system running within the virtual machines. The proposed hypervisor-based cloud intrusion detection system does not require additional software installed in virtual machines and has many advantages compared to host-based and network based intrusion detection systems which can complement these traditional approaches to intrusion detection.

Nowadays, our surrounding environment is more and more scattered with various types of sensors. Due to their intrinsic properties and representation formats, they form small islands isolated from each other. In order to increase interoperability and release their full capabilities, we propose to represent devices descriptions including data and service invocation with a common model allowing to compose mashups of heterogeneous sensors. Pushing this paradigm further, we also propose to augment service descriptions with a discovery protocol easing automatic assimilation of knowledge. In this work, we describe the architecture supporting what can be called a Semantic Sensor Web-of-Things. As proof of concept, we apply our proposal to the domain of smart buildings, composing a novel ontology covering heterogeneous sensing, actuation and service invocation. Our architecture also emphasizes on the energetic aspect and is optimized for constrained environments.