Biblio

In recent years, the need for seamless connectivity has increased across various network platforms with demands coming from industries, home, mobile, transportation and office networks. The 5th generation (5G) network is being deployed to meet such demand of high-speed seamless network device connections. The seamless connectivity 5G provides could be a security threat allowing attacks such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) because attackers might have easy access into the network infrastructure and higher bandwidth to enhance the effects of the attack. The aim of this research is to provide a security solution for 5G technology to DDoS attacks by managing the response to threats posed by DDoS. Deploying a security policy language which is reactive and event-oriented fits into a flexible, efficient, and lightweight security approach. A policy in our language consists of an event whose occurrence triggers a policy rule where one or more actions are taken.

Smart Grids require extensive communication to enable safe and stable energy supply in the age of decentralized and dynamic energy production and consumption. To protect the communication in this critical infrastructure, public authorities mandate smart meter gateways (SMGWs) to be in control of the communication security. To this end, the SMGW intercepts all inbound and outbound communication of its premise, e.g., a factory or smart home, and forwards it on secure channels that the SMGW established itself. However, using the SMGW as proxy, local devices can neither review the security of these remote connections established by the SMGW nor enforce higher security guarantees than established by the all in one configuration of the SMGW which does not allow for use case-specific security settings. We present mechanisms that enable local devices to regain this insight and control over the full connection, i.e., up to the final receiver, while retaining the SMGW's ability to ensure a suitable security level. Our evaluation shows modest computation and transmission overheads for this increased security in the critical smart grid infrastructure.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way we interact with everyday objects. "Smart" devices will reduce energy use, keep our homes safe, and improve our health. However, as recent attacks have shown, these devices also create tremendous security vulnerabilities in our computing networks. Securing all of these devices is a daunting task. In this paper, we argue that IoT device communications should be default-off and desired network communications must be explicitly enabled. Unlike traditional networked applications or devices like a web browser or PC, IoT applications and devices serve narrowly defined purposes and do not require access to all services in the network. Our proposal, Bark, a policy language and runtime for specifying and enforcing minimal access permissions in IoT networks, exploits this fact. Bark phrases access control policies in terms of natural questions (who, what, where, when, and how) and transforms them into transparently enforceable rules for IoT application protocols. Bark can express detailed rules such as "Let the lights see the luminosity of the bedroom sensor at any time" and "Let a device at my front door, if I approve it, unlock my smart lock for 30 seconds" in a way that is presentable and explainable to users. We implement Bark for Wi-Fi/IP and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks and evaluate its efficacy on several example applications and attacks.

Third-party storage services pose the risk of integrity and confidentiality violations as the current storage policy enforcement mechanisms are spread across many layers in the system stack. To mitigate these security vulnerabilities, we present the design and implementation of Pesos, a Policy Enhanced Secure Object Store (Pesos) for untrusted third-party storage providers. Pesos allows clients to specify per-object security policies, concisely and separately from the storage stack, and enforces these policies by securely mediating the I/O in the persistence layer through a single unified enforcement layer. More broadly, Pesos exposes a rich set of storage policies ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and access accounting for data storage through a declarative policy language. Pesos enforces these policies on untrusted commodity platforms by leveraging a combination of two trusted computing technologies: Intel SGX for trusted execution environment (TEE) and Kinetic Open Storage for trusted storage. We have implemented Pesos as a fully-functional storage system supporting many useful end-to-end storage features, and a range of effective performance optimizations. We evaluated Pesos using a range of micro-benchmarks, and real-world use cases. Our evaluation shows that Pesos incurs reasonable performance overheads for the enforcement of policies while keeping the trusted computing base (TCB) small.