A decision support system for corporations cyber security risk management

This thesis presents a decision aiding system named C3-SEC (Contex-aware Corporative Cyber Security), developed in the context of a master program at Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Portugal. The research dimension and the corresponding software development process that followed are presented and validated with an application scenario and case study performed at Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas ESPE – Ecuador. C3-SEC is a decision aiding software intended to support cyber risks and cyber threats analysis of a corporative information and communications technological infrastructure. The resulting software product will help corporations Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) on cyber security risk analysis, decision-making and prevention measures for the infrastructure and information assets protection. The work is initially focused on the evaluation of the most popular and relevant tools available for risk assessment and decision making in the cyber security domain. Their properties, metrics and strategies are studied and their support for cyber security risk analysis, decision-making and prevention is assessed for the protection of organization's information assets. A contribution for cyber security experts decision support is then proposed by the means of reuse and integration of existing tools and C3-SEC software. C3-SEC extends existing tools features from the data collection and data analysis (perception) level to a full context-ware reference model. The software developed makes use of semantic level, ontology-based knowledge representation and inference supported by widely adopted standards, as well as cyber security standards (CVE, CPE, CVSS, etc.) and cyber security information data sources made available by international authorities, to share and exchange information in this domain. C3-SEC development follows a context-aware systems reference model addressing the perception, comprehension, projection and decision/action layers to create corporative scale cyber security situation awareness

Context-Aware and Adaptive Usage Control Model

Information protection is a key issue for the acceptance and adoption of pervasive computing systems where various portable devices such as smart phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and laptop computers are being used to share information and to access digital resources via wireless connection to the Internet. Because these are resources constrained devices and highly mobile, changes in the environmental context or device context can affect the security of the system a great deal. A proper security mechanism must be put in place which is able to cope with changing environmental and system context. Usage CONtrol (UCON) model is the latest major enhancement of the traditional access control models which enables mutability of subject and object attributes, and continuity of control on usage of resources. In UCON, access permission decision is based on three factors: authorisations, obligations and conditions. While authorisations and obligations are requirements that must be fulfilled by the subject and the object, conditions are subject and object independent requirements that must be satisfied by the environment. As a consequence, access permission may be revoked (and the access stopped) as a result of changes in the environment regardless of whether the authorisations and obligations requirements are met. This constitutes a major shortcoming of the UCON model in pervasive computing systems which constantly strive to adapt to environmental changes so as to minimise disruptions to the user. We propose a Context-Aware and Adaptive Usage Control (CA-UCON) model which extends the traditional UCON model to enable adaptation to environmental changes in the aim of preserving continuity of access. Indeed, when the authorisation and obligations requirements are fulfilled by the subject and object, and the conditions requirements fail due to changes in the environmental or the system context, our proposed model CA-UCON triggers specific actions in order to adapt to the new situation, so as to ensure continuity of usage. We then propose an architecture of CA-UCON model, presenting its various components. In this model, we integrated the adaptation decision with usage decision architecture, the comprehensive definition of each components and reveals the functions performed by each components in the architecture are presented. We also propose a novel computational model of our CA-UCON architecture. This model is formally specified as a finite state machine. It demonstrates how the access request of the subject is handled in CA-UCON model, including detail with regards to revoking of access and actions undertaken due to context changes. The extension of the original UCON architecture can be understood from this model. The formal specification of the CA-UCON is presented utilising the Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA). This mathematical notation is considered suitable for modelling mobile and context-aware systems and has been preferred over alternatives for the following reasons: (i) Mobility and Context awareness are primitive constructs in CCA; (ii) A system's properties can be formally analysed; (iii) Most importantly, CCA specifications are executable allowing early validation of system properties and accelerated development of prototypes. For evaluation of CA-UCON model, a real-world case study of a ubiquitous learning (u-learning) system is selected. We propose a CA-UCON model for the u-learning system. This model is then formalised in CCA and the resultant specification is executed and analysed using an execution environment of CCA. Finally, we investigate the enforcement approaches for CA-UCON model. We present the CA-UCON reference monitor architecture with its components. We then proceed to demonstrate three types of enforcement architectures of the CA-UCON model: centralised architecture, distributed architecture and hybrid architecture. These are discussed in detail, including the analysis of their merits and drawbacks

Systematic support for accountability in the cloud

PhD ThesisCloud computing offers computational resources such as processing, networking, and storage to customers. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consists of a cloud-based infrastructure to offer consumers raw computation resources such as storage and networking. These resources are billed using a pay-per-use cost model. However, IaaS is far from being a secure cloud infrastructure as the seven main security threats defined by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) indicate. Use of logging systems can provide evidence to support accountability for an IaaS cloud. An accountability helps when mitigating known threats. However, previous accountability with logging systems solutions are provided without systematic approaches. These solutions are usually either for the cloud customer side or for the cloud provider side, not for both of them. Moreover, the solutions also lack descriptions of logging systems in the context of a design pattern of the systems' components. This design pattern facilitates analysis of logging systems in terms of their quality. Additionally, there is a number of benefits of this pattern. They could be: to promote the reusability of design and development of logging systems; that designers can access this pattern more easily; to assist a designer adopts design approaches which make a logging system reusable and not to choose approaches which do not concern reusability concepts; and to enhance the documentation and maintenance of existing logging systems. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to provide support for accountability in the cloud with systematic approaches to assist in mitigating the risks associated with real world CSA threats, to benefit both customers and providers. We research the extent to which such logging systems help us to mitigate risks associated with the threats identified by the CSA. The thesis also presents a way of identifying the reference components of logging systems and how they may be arranged to satisfy logging requirements. 'Generic logging components' for logging systems are proposed. These components encompass all possible instantiations of logging solutions for IaaS cloud. The generic logging components can be used to map existing logging systems for the purposes of analysis of the systems' security. Based on the generic components, the thesis identifies design patterns in the context of logging in IaaS cloud. We believe that these identified patterns facilitate analysis of logging systems in terms of their quality. We also argue that: these identified patterns could increase reusability of the design and development of logging systems; designers should access these patterns more easily; the patterns could assist a designer adopts design approaches which make a logging system reusable and not to choose approaches which do not concern reusability concepts; and they can enhance the documentation and maintenance of existing logging systems. We identify a logging solution which is based on the generic logging components to mitigate the risks associated with CSA threat number one. An example of the threat is malicious activities, for example spamming, which are performed in consumers' virtual machines or VMs. We argue that the generic logging components we suggest could be used to perform a systematic analysis of logging systems in terms of security before deploying them in production systems. To assist in mitigating the risks associated with this threat to benefit both customers and providers, we investigate how CSA threat number one can affect the security of both consumers and providers. Then we propose logging solutions based on the generic logging components and the identified patterns. We systematically design and implement a prototype system of the proposed logging solutions in an IaaS to record history of customer's files. This prototype system can be also modified in order to record VMs' process behaviour log files. This system can record the log files while having a smaller trusted computing base, compared to previous work. Additionally, the system can be seen as possible solutions that could tackle the dificult problem of logging file and process activities in the IaaS. Thus, the proposed logging solutions can assist in mitigating the risks associated with the CSA threats to benefit both consumers and providers. This could promote systematic support for accountability in the cloud

Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS - a collection of Technical Notes Part 1

This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. Part 2: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and Guidelines

Mechatronics & the cloud

Conventionally, the engineering design process has assumed that the design team is able to exercise control over all elements of the design, either directly or indirectly in the case of sub-systems through their specifications. The introduction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) means that a design team’s ability to have control over all elements of a system is no longer the case, particularly as the actual system configuration may well be being dynamically reconfigured in real-time according to user (and vendor) context and need. Additionally, the integration of the Internet of Things with elements of Big Data means that information becomes a commodity to be autonomously traded by and between systems, again according to context and need, all of which has implications for the privacy of system users. The paper therefore considers the relationship between mechatronics and cloud-basedtechnologies in relation to issues such as the distribution of functionality and user privacy

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

A User-Focused Reference Model for Wireless Systems Beyond 3G

This whitepaper describes a proposal from Working Group 1, the Human Perspective of the Wireless World, for a user-focused reference model for systems beyond 3G. The general structure of the proposed model involves two "planes": the Value Plane and the Capability Plane. The characteristics of these planes are discussed in detail and an example application of the model to a specific scenario for the wireless world is provided