Scientific Foundations

The goal of the Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project is to develop methods for building information systems with meaningful multi-layered security guarantees. The modular approach of MACS focuses on systems that are built from smaller and separable functional components, where the security of each component is asserted individually, and where the security of the system as a whole can be derived from the security of its components. The project concentrates on building outsourced, cloud-based information services with client-centric security guarantees.

Cyberattacks are enabled by software vulnerabilities that allow attackers to plant software exploits. As old vulnerabilities are found and fixed, attackers continue to find new ones. As a result, software vendors, system administrators and security professionals have come to rely increasingly on techniques that insert additional code into software for detecting and/or blocking cyber attacks in progress.

One of the oldest and most challenging problems in cyber security is to enable secure information sharing (SIS) (i.e., maintaining some control over information even after it has been shared.) For example, a product manufacturer may need to share customer account information with a company that ships the products and bills the customers. The manufacturer cannot allow its partner to then misuse those customer records by direct marketing or selling customer records. This project focuses on the policy challenge of specifying, analyzing and enforcing SIS policies.

Current cloud based systems enable distributed access to both information and computational resources. In this setting, it is imperative to have secure communication, and powerful and expensive cryptographic techniques have been proposed to address this issue. A severely limiting factor, however, is that these methods for securely accessing or processing data between participating parties can result in communication overheads when processing large amounts of data.

As higher education institutions consider moving services to the cloud to save costs and improve collaboration, significant challenges to successful large-scale adoption still exist. Institutions are unwilling to risk cloud deployment because provable technological defenses have thus far been lacking. Control over sensitive data is relinquished without the institution's knowledge, liability is shifted and data breach risks are significantly increased. Further, regulatory-sensitive data has become an increasingly attractive target.