Biblio

Improving e-government services by using data more effectively is a major focus globally. It requires Public Administrations to be transparent, accountable and provide trustworthy services that improve citizen confidence. However, despite all the technological advantages on developing such services and analysing security and privacy concerns, the literature does not provide evidence of frameworks and platforms that enable privacy analysis, from multiple perspectives, and take into account citizens' needs with regards to transparency and usage of citizens information. This paper presents the VisiOn (Visual Privacy Management in User Centric Open Requirements) platform, an outcome of a H2020 European Project. Our objective is to enable Public Administrations to analyse privacy and security from different perspectives, including requirements, threats, trust and law compliance. Finally, our platform-supported approach introduces the concept of Privacy Level Agreement (PLA) which allows Public Administrations to customise their privacy policies based on the privacy preferences of each citizen.

E-Governance is rising rapidly in various parts of the world. And with rising digitization of the resources, the threats to the infrastructure and digital data is also rising within the government departments. For developed nations, the security parameters and optimization process is well placed but for developing nations like India, the security parameter is yet to be addressed strongly. This study proposes a framework for security assessment amongst E-Governance departments based on Information System principles. The major areas of security to be covered up are towards Hardware, Network, Software, Server, & Data security, Physical Environment Security, and various policies for security of Information Systems at organizational level.

Authorization policy authoring has required tools from the start. With access policy governance now an executive-level responsibility, it is imperative that such a tool expose the policy to business users' with little or no IT intervention-as natural language. NIST SP 800-162 [1] first prescribes natural language policies (NLPs) as the preferred expression of policy and then implicitly calls for automated translation of NLP to machine-executable code. This paper therefore proposes an interoperable model for the NLP's human expression. It furthermore documents the research and development of a tool set for end-to-end authoring and translation. This R&D journey-focusing constantly on end users' has debunked certain myths, has responded to steadily increasing market sophistication, has applied formal disciplines (e.g. ontologies, grammars and compiler design) and has motivated an informal demonstration of autonomic code generation. The lessons learned should be of practical value to the entire ABAC community. The research in progress' increasingly complex policies, proactive rule analytics, and expanded NLP authoring language support will require collaboration with an ever-expanding technical community from industry and academia.

This paper presents the preliminary framework proposed by the authors for drivers of Smart Governance. The research question of this study is: What are the drivers for Smart Governance to achieve evidence-based policy-making? The framework suggests that in order to create a smart governance model, data governance and collaborative governance are the main drivers. These pillars are supported by legal framework, normative factors, principles and values, methods, data assets or human resources, and IT infrastructure. These aspects will guide a real time evaluation process in all levels of the policy cycle, towards to the implementation of evidence-based policies.

Cloud computing is significantly reshaping the computing industry built around core concepts such as virtualization, processing power, connectivity and elasticity to store and share IT resources via a broad network. It has emerged as the key technology that unleashes the potency of Big Data, Internet of Things, Mobile and Web Applications, and other related technologies; but it also comes with its challenges - such as governance, security, and privacy. This paper is focused on the security and privacy challenges of cloud computing with specific reference to user authentication and access management for cloud SaaS applications. The suggested model uses a framework that harnesses the stateless and secure nature of JWT for client authentication and session management. Furthermore, authorized access to protected cloud SaaS resources have been efficiently managed. Accordingly, a Policy Match Gate (PMG) component and a Policy Activity Monitor (PAM) component have been introduced. In addition, other subcomponents such as a Policy Validation Unit (PVU) and a Policy Proxy DB (PPDB) have also been established for optimized service delivery. A theoretical analysis of the proposed model portrays a system that is secure, lightweight and highly scalable for improved cloud resource security and management.

In the multi-cloud tenancy environments, Web Service offers an standard approach for discovering and using capabilities in an environment that transcends ownership domains. This brings into concern the ownership and security related to Web Service governance. Our approach for this issue involves an ESB-integrated middleware for security criteria regulation on Clouds. It uses an attribute-based security policy model for the exhibition of assets consumers' security profiles and deducing service accessing decision. Assets represent computing power/functionality and information/data provided by entities. Experiments show the middleware to bring minor governance burdens on the hardware aspect, as well as better performance with colosum scaling property, dealing well with cumbersome policy files, which is probably the situation of complex composite service scenarios.

Fast Health Interoperability Services (FHIR) is the most recent in the line of standards for healthcare resources. FHIR represents different types of medical artifacts as resources and also provides recommendations for their authorized disclosure using web-based protocols including O-Auth and OpenId Connect and also defines security labels. In most cases, Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is used to secure access to FHIR resources. We provide an alternative approach based on Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) that allows attributes of subjects and objects to take part in authorization decision. Our system allows various stakeholders to define policies governing the release of healthcare data. It also authenticates the end user requesting access. Our system acts as a middle-layer between the end-user and the FHIR server. Our system provides efficient release of individual and batch resources both during normal operations and also during emergencies. We also provide an implementation that demonstrates the feasibility of our approach.

As the use of cloud computing and autonomous computing increases, integrity verification of the software stack used in a system becomes a critical issue. In this paper, we analyze the internal behavior of IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture), one of the most well-known integrity verification frameworks employed in the Linux kernel. For integrity verification, IMA measures all executables and their configuration files in a trusty manner using TPM (Trust Platform Module). Our analysis reveals that there are two obstacles in IMA, measurement overhead and nondeterminism. To address these problems, we propose two novel techniques, called batch extend and core measurement. The former is a technique that accumulates the measured values of executables/files and extends them into TPM in a batch fashion. The second technique measures some specified executables/files only so that it verifies the core integrity of a system in which a user or a remote party is interested. Real implementation based evaluation shows that our proposal can reduce the booting time from 122 to 23 seconds, while supporting the same integrity verification capability of the default IMA policy.

Mobile application offloading, with the purpose of extending battery lifetime and increasing performance has been intensively discussed recently, resulting in various different solutions: mobile device clones operated as virtual machines in the cloud, simultaneously running applications on the mobile device and on a distant server, as well as flexible solutions dynamically acquiring other mobile devices' resources in the user's surrounding. Existing solutions have gaps in the fields of data security and application security. These gaps can be closed by integrating data usage policies, as well as application-flow policies. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel approach of integrating XACML into existing mobile application offloading-frameworks. Data owners remain in full control of their data, still, technologies like device-to-device offloading can be used.