Secure Information Systems Engineering: A Manifesto

In this paper, we lay down the agenda for a discipline that is meant to promote research on increasing the development of secure information systems. In particular, we introduce areas related to the development of secure information systems; we identify limitations of existing approaches and the barriers that currently limit research and we discuss the characteristics for an engineering discipline for the development of secure information systems, its principles and the challenges that must be addressed

Performance Evaluation of Distributed Security Protocols Using Discrete Event Simulation

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that manages inter-domain routing on the Internet lacks security. Protective measures using public key cryptography introduce complexities and costs. To support authentication and other security functionality in large networks, we need public key infrastructures (PKIs). Protocols that distribute and validate certificates introduce additional complexities and costs. The certification path building algorithm that helps users establish trust on certificates in the distributed network environment is particularly complicated. Neither routing security nor PKI come for free. Prior to this work, the research study on performance issues of these large-scale distributed security systems was minimal. In this thesis, we evaluate the performance of BGP security protocols and PKI systems. We answer the questions about how the performance affects protocol behaviors and how we can improve the efficiency of these distributed protocols to bring them one step closer to reality. The complexity of the Internet makes an analytical approach difficult; and the scale of Internet makes empirical approaches also unworkable. Consequently, we take the approach of simulation. We have built the simulation frameworks to model a number of BGP security protocols and the PKI system. We have identified performance problems of Secure BGP (S-BGP), a primary BGP security protocol, and proposed and evaluated Signature Amortization (S-A) and Aggregated Path Authentication (APA) schemes that significantly improve efficiency of S-BGP without compromising security. We have also built a simulation framework for general PKI systems and evaluated certification path building algorithms, a critical part of establishing trust in Internet-scale PKI, and used this framework to improve algorithm performance

Studies on high-speed hardware implementation of cryptographic algorithms

Cryptographic algorithms are ubiquitous in modern communication systems where they have a central role in ensuring information security. This thesis studies efficient implementation of certain widely-used cryptographic algorithms. Cryptographic algorithms are computationally demanding and software-based implementations are often too slow or power consuming which yields a need for hardware implementation. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are programmable logic devices which have proven to be highly feasible implementation platforms for cryptographic algorithms because they provide both speed and programmability. Hence, the use of FPGAs for cryptography has been intensively studied in the research community and FPGAs are also the primary implementation platforms in this thesis. This thesis presents techniques allowing faster implementations than existing ones. Such techniques are necessary in order to use high-security cryptographic algorithms in applications requiring high data rates, for example, in heavily loaded network servers. The focus is on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the most commonly used secret-key cryptographic algorithm, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), public-key cryptographic algorithms which have gained popularity in the recent years and are replacing traditional public-key cryptosystems, such as RSA. Because these algorithms are well-defined and widely-used, the results of this thesis can be directly applied in practice. The contributions of this thesis include improvements to both algorithms and techniques for implementing them. Algorithms are modified in order to make them more suitable for hardware implementation, especially, focusing on increasing parallelism. Several FPGA implementations exploiting these modifications are presented in the thesis including some of the fastest implementations available in the literature. The most important contributions of this thesis relate to ECC and, specifically, to a family of elliptic curves providing faster computations called Koblitz curves. The results of this thesis can, in their part, enable increasing use of cryptographic algorithms in various practical applications where high computation speed is an issue

Department of Computer Science Activity 1998-2004

This report summarizes much of the research and teaching activity of the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College between late 1998 and late 2004. The material for this report was collected as part of the final report for NSF Institutional Infrastructure award EIA-9802068, which funded equipment and technical staff during that six-year period. This equipment and staff supported essentially all of the department\u27s research activity during that period

Usability issues with security of electronic mail

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis shows that human factors can have a large and direct impact on security, not only on the user’s satisfaction, but also on the level of security achieved in practice. The usability issues identified are also extended to include mental models and perceptions as well as traditional user interface issues. These findings were accomplished through three studies using various methodologies to best suit their aims. The research community have issued principles to better align security and usability, so it was first necessary to evaluate their effectiveness. The chosen method for achieving this was through a usability study of the most recent software specifically to use these principles. It was found that the goal of being simultaneously usable and secure was not entirely met, partially through problems identified with the software interface, but largely due to the user’s perceptions and actions whilst using the software. This makes it particularly difficult to design usable and secure software without detailed knowledge of the users attitudes and perceptions, especially if we are not to blame the user for security errors as has occurred in the past. Particular focus was given to e-mail security because it is an area in which there is a massive number of vectors for security threats, and in which it is technologically possible to negate most of these threats, yet this is not occurring. Interviews were used to gain in depth information from the user’s point of view. Data was collected from individual e-mail users from the general public, and organisations. It was found that although the literature had identified various problems with the software and process of e-mail encryption, the majority of problems identified in the interviews stemmed once again from user’s perceptions and attitudes. Use of encryption was virtually nil, although the desire to use encryption to protect privacy was strong. Remembering secure passwords was recurrently found to be problematic, so in an effort to propose a specific method of increasing their usability an empirical experiment was used to examine the memorability of passwords. Specially constructed passwords were tested for their ability to improve memorability, and therefore usability. No statistical significance in the construction patterns was found, but a memory phenomenon whereby users tend to forget their password after a specific period of non-use was discovered. The findings are discussed with reference to the fact that they all draw on a theme of responsibility to maintain good security, both from the perspective of the software developer and the end user. The term Personal Liability and General Use Evaluation (PLaGUE) is introduced to highlight the importance of considering these responsibilities and their effect on the use of security

Context-aware access control in ubiquitous computing (CRAAC)

Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) envisions a new computing environment, where computing devices and related technology are widespread (i.e. everywhere) and services are provided at anytime. The technology is embedded discreetly in the environment to raise users' awareness. UbiComp environments support the proliferation of heterogeneous devices such as embedded computing devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), wearable computers, mobile phones, laptops, office desktops (PCs), and hardware sensors. These devices may be interconnected by common networks (e.g. wired, wireless), and may have different levels of capabilities (i.e. computational power, storage, power consumption, etc). They are seamlessly integrated and interoperated to provide smart services (i.e. adaptive services). A UbiComp environment provides smart services to users based on the users' and/or system's current contexts. It provides the services to users unobtrusively and in turn the user's interactions with the environment should be as non-intrusive and as transparent as possible. Access to such smart services and devices must be controlled by an effective access control system that adapts its decisions based on the changes in the surrounding contextual information. This thesis aims at designing an adaptive fine-grained access control solution that seamlessly fits into UbiComp environments. The solution should be flexible in supporting the use of different contextual information and efficient, in terms of access delays, in controlling access to resources with divergent levels of sensitivity. The main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of the Context-Risk-Aware Access Control (CRAAC) model. CRAAC achieves fine-grained access control based upon the risk level in the underlying access environment and/or the sensitivity level of the requested resource object. CRAAC makes new contributions to the access control field, those include 1) introducing the concept of level of assurance based access control, 2) providing a method to convert the contextual attributes values into the corresponding level of assurance, 3) Proposing two methods to aggregate the set of level of assurance into one requester level of assurance, 4) supporting four modes of working each suits a different application context and/or access control requirements, 5) a comprehensive access control architecture that supports the CRAAC four modes of working, and 6) an evaluation of the CRAAC performance at runtime.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online Serviceral Centre and Educational BureauCairo UniversityGBUnited Kingdo

Interdomain User Authentication and Privacy

This thesis looks at the issue of interdomain user authentication, i.e. user authentication in systems that extend over more than one administrative domain. It is divided into three parts. After a brief overview of related literature, the first part provides a taxonomy of current approaches to the problem. The taxonomy is first used to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and then employed as the basis for putting into context four concrete and novel schemes that are subsequently proposed in this part of the thesis. Three of these schemes build on existing technology; the first on 2nd and 3rd-generation cellular (mobile) telephony, the second on credit/debit smartcards, and the third on Trusted Computing. The fourth scheme is, in certain ways, different from the others. Most notably, unlike the other three schemes, it does not require the user to possess tamper-resistant hardware, and it is suitable for use from an untrusted access device. An implementation of the latter scheme (which works as a web proxy) is also described in this part of the thesis. As the need to preserve one’s privacy continues to gain importance in the digital world, it is important to enhance user authentication schemes with properties that enable users to remain anonymous (yet authenticated). In the second part of the thesis, anonymous credential systems are identified as a tool that can be used to achieve this goal. A formal model that captures relevant security and privacy notions for such systems is proposed. From this model, it is evident that there exist certain inherent limits to the privacy that such systems can offer. These are examined in more detail, and a scheme is proposed that mitigates the exposure to certain attacks that exploit these limits in order to compromise user privacy. The second part of the thesis also shows how to use an anonymous credential system in order to facilitate what we call ‘privacy-aware single sign-on’ in an open environment. The scheme enables the user to authenticate himself to service providers under separate identifier, where these identifiers cannot be linked to each other, even if all service providers collude. It is demonstrated that the anonymity enhancement scheme proposed earlier is particularly suited in this special application of anonymous credential systems. Finally, the third part of the thesis concludes with some open research questions