TRIDEnT: Building Decentralized Incentives for Collaborative Security

Sophisticated mass attacks, especially when exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, have the potential to cause destructive damage to organizations and critical infrastructure. To timely detect and contain such attacks, collaboration among the defenders is critical. By correlating real-time detection information (alerts) from multiple sources (collaborative intrusion detection), defenders can detect attacks and take the appropriate defensive measures in time. However, although the technical tools to facilitate collaboration exist, real-world adoption of such collaborative security mechanisms is still underwhelming. This is largely due to a lack of trust and participation incentives for companies and organizations. This paper proposes TRIDEnT, a novel collaborative platform that aims to enable and incentivize parties to exchange network alert data, thus increasing their overall detection capabilities. TRIDEnT allows parties that may be in a competitive relationship, to selectively advertise, sell and acquire security alerts in the form of (near) real-time peer-to-peer streams. To validate the basic principles behind TRIDEnT, we present an intuitive game-theoretic model of alert sharing, that is of independent interest, and show that collaboration is bound to take place infinitely often. Furthermore, to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we instantiate our design in a decentralized manner using Ethereum smart contracts and provide a fully functional prototype.Comment: 28 page

An Assessment of PIER Electric Grid Research 2003-2014 White Paper

This white paper describes the circumstances in California around the turn of the 21st century that led the California Energy Commission (CEC) to direct additional Public Interest Energy Research funds to address critical electric grid issues, especially those arising from integrating high penetrations of variable renewable generation with the electric grid. It contains an assessment of the beneficial science and technology advances of the resultant portfolio of electric grid research projects administered under the direction of the CEC by a competitively selected contractor, the University of California’s California Institute for Energy and the Environment, from 2003-2014

Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy Rules through Technology

Historically, law and government regulation have established default rules for information policy, including constitutional rules on freedom of expression and statutory rights of ownership of information. This Article will show that for network environments and the Information Society, however, law and government regulation are not the only source of rule-making. Technological capabilities and system design choices impose rules on participants. The creation and implementation of information policy are embedded in network designs and standards as well as in system configurations. Even user preferences and technical choices create overarching, local default rules. This Article argues, in essence, that the set of rules for information flows imposed by technology and communication networks form a “Lex Informatica” that policymakers must understand, consciously recognize, and encourage

Security Constrained Multi-Stage Transmission Expansion Planning Considering a Continuously Variable Series Reactor

This paper introduces a Continuously Variable Series Reactor (CVSR) to the transmission expansion planning (TEP) problem. The CVSR is a FACTS-like device which has the capability of controlling the overall impedance of the transmission line. However, the cost of the CVSR is about one tenth of a similar rated FACTS device which potentially allows large numbers of devices to be installed. The multi-stage TEP with the CVSR considering the $N-1$ security constraints is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. The nonlinear part of the power flow introduced by the variable reactance is linearized by a reformulation technique. To reduce the computational burden for a practical large scale system, a decomposition approach is proposed. The detailed simulation results on the IEEE 24-bus and a more practical Polish 2383-bus system demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. Moreover, the appropriately allocated CVSRs add flexibility to the TEP problem and allow reduced planning costs. Although the proposed decomposition approach cannot guarantee global optimality, a high level picture of how the network can be planned reliably and economically considering CVSR is achieved.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Power System

Methodologies to develop quantitative risk evaluation metrics

The goal of this work is to advance a new methodology to measure a severity cost for each host using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) based on base, temporal and environmental metrics by combining related sub-scores to produce a unique severity cost by modeling the problem's parameters in to a mathematical framework. We build our own CVSS Calculator using our equations to simplify the calculations of the vulnerabilities scores and to benchmark with other models. We design and develop a new approach to represent the cost assigned to each host by dividing the scores of the vulnerabilities to two main levels of privileges, user and root, and we classify these levels into operational levels to identify and calculate the severity cost of multi steps vulnerabilities. Finally we implement our framework on a simple network, using Nessus scanner as tool to discover known vulnerabilities and to implement the results to build and represent our cost centric attack graph

Attack-Surface Metrics, OSSTMM and Common Criteria Based Approach to “Composable Security” in Complex Systems

In recent studies on Complex Systems and Systems-of-Systems theory, a huge effort has been put to cope with behavioral problems, i.e. the possibility of controlling a desired overall or end-to-end behavior by acting on the individual elements that constitute the system itself. This problem is particularly important in the “SMART” environments, where the huge number of devices, their significant computational capabilities as well as their tight interconnection produce a complex architecture for which it is difficult to predict (and control) a desired behavior; furthermore, if the scenario is allowed to dynamically evolve through the modification of both topology and subsystems composition, then the control problem becomes a real challenge. In this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to cope with a specific class of control problems in complex systems, the “composability of security functionalities”, recently introduced by the European Funded research through the pSHIELD and nSHIELD projects (ARTEMIS-JU programme). In a nutshell, the objective of this research is to define a control framework that, given a target security level for a specific application scenario, is able to i) discover the system elements, ii) quantify the security level of each element as well as its contribution to the security of the overall system, and iii) compute the control action to be applied on such elements to reach the security target. The main innovations proposed by the authors are: i) the definition of a comprehensive methodology to quantify the security of a generic system independently from the technology and the environment and ii) the integration of the derived metrics into a closed-loop scheme that allows real-time control of the system. The solution described in this work moves from the proof-of-concepts performed in the early phase of the pSHIELD research and enrich es it through an innovative metric with a sound foundation, able to potentially cope with any kind of pplication scenarios (railways, automotive, manufacturing, ...)

The Sensoria Approach Applied to the Finance Case Study

This chapter provides an effective implementation of (part of) the Sensoria approach, specifically modelling and formal analysis of service-oriented software based on mathematically founded techniques. The ‘Finance case study’ is used as a test bed for demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the use of the process calculus COWS and some of its related analysis techniques and tools. In particular, we report the results of an application of a temporal logic and its model checker for expressing and checking functional properties of services and a type system for guaranteeing confidentiality properties of services

Prochlo: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd

The large-scale monitoring of computer users' software activities has become commonplace, e.g., for application telemetry, error reporting, or demographic profiling. This paper describes a principled systems architecture---Encode, Shuffle, Analyze (ESA)---for performing such monitoring with high utility while also protecting user privacy. The ESA design, and its Prochlo implementation, are informed by our practical experiences with an existing, large deployment of privacy-preserving software monitoring. (cont.; see the paper