Biblio

The defense-in-depth approach has been widely recommended for designing critical information infrastructure, however, the lack of holistic design guidelines makes it difficult for many organizations to adopt the concept. Therefore, this paper proposes a holistic architectural framework and guidelines based on ring-based nested network zones for designing such highly secured information systems. This novel security architectural framework and guidelines offer the overall structural design and implementation options for holistically designing the N-tier/shared nothing system architectures. The implementation options, e.g. for the zone's perimeters, are recommended to achieve different capability levels of security or to trade off among different required security attributes. This framework enables the adaptive capability suitable for different real-world contexts. This paper also proposes an attack-hops verification approach as a tool to evaluate the architectural design.

Access to computer systems and the information held on them, be it commercially or personally sensitive, is naturally, strictly controlled by both legal and technical security measures. One such method is digital identity, which is used to authenticate and authorize users to provide access to IT infrastructure to perform official, financial or sensitive operations within organisations. However, transmitting and sharing this sensitive information with other organisations over insecure channels always poses a significant security and privacy risk. An example of an effective solution to this problem is the Federated Identity Management (FIdM) standard adopted in the cloud environment. The FIdM standard is used to authenticate and authorize users across multiple organisations to obtain access to their networks and resources without transmitting sensitive information to other organisations. Using the same authentication and authorization details among multiple organisations in one federated group, it protects the identities and credentials of users in the group. This protection is a balance, mitigating security risk whilst maintaining a positive experience for users. Three of the most popular FIdM standards are Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Open Authentication (OAuth), and OpenID Connect (OIDC). This paper presents an assessment of these standards considering their architectural design, working, security strength and security vulnerability, to cognise and ascertain effective usages to protect digital identities and credentials. Firstly, it explains the architectural design and working of these standards. Secondly, it proposes several assessment criteria and compares functionalities of these standards based on the proposed criteria. Finally, it presents a comprehensive analysis of their security vulnerabilities to aid in selecting an apposite FIdM. This analysis of security vulnerabilities is of great significance because their improper or erroneous deployme- t may be exploited for attacks.