7,967 research outputs found
A Secure Network Node Approach to the Policy Decision Point in Distributed Access Control
To date, the vast majority of access control research and development has been on gathering, managing, and exchanging information about users. But an equally important component which has yet to be fully developed is the Policy Decision Point - the system that decides whether an access request should be granted given certain attributes of the requestor. This paper describes the research and implementation of a new PDP system for an undergraduate honors project. This PDP system employs three unique features which differentiate it from existing technology: collaboration capabilities, trusted management, and interoperability with other access control systems. Security considerations and future research areas are also discussed
A comprehensive meta-analysis of cryptographic security mechanisms for cloud computing
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The concept of cloud computing offers measurable computational or information resources as a service over the Internet. The major motivation behind the cloud setup is economic benefits, because it assures the reduction in expenditure for operational and infrastructural purposes. To transform it into a reality there are some impediments and hurdles which are required to be tackled, most profound of which are security, privacy and reliability issues. As the user data is revealed to the cloud, it departs the protection-sphere of the data owner. However, this brings partly new security and privacy concerns. This work focuses on these issues related to various cloud services and deployment models by spotlighting their major challenges. While the classical cryptography is an ancient discipline, modern cryptography, which has been mostly developed in the last few decades, is the subject of study which needs to be implemented so as to ensure strong security and privacy mechanisms in today’s real-world scenarios. The technological solutions, short and long term research goals of the cloud security will be described and addressed using various classical cryptographic mechanisms as well as modern ones. This work explores the new directions in cloud computing security, while highlighting the correct selection of these fundamental technologies from cryptographic point of view
A cooperative cellular and broadcast conditional access system for Pay-TV systems
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.The lack of interoperability between Pay-TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay-TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay-TV systems. As a result, this paper presents the Mobile Conditional Access System (MICAS) as an end-to-end access control solution for Pay-TV systems. It incorporates the mobile and broadcasting systems and provides a platform whereby service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalize their services and adopt appropriate security measurements. This would result in the decrease of operating expenses and increase of customers' satisfaction in the system. The paper provides an overview of state-of-the-art conditional access solutions followed by detailed description of design, reference model implementation and analysis of possible MICAS security architectures.Strategy & Technology (S&T) Lt
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R-PEKS: RBAC Enabled PEKS for Secure Access of Cloud Data
In the recent past, few works have been done by combining attribute-based access control with multi-user PEKS, i.e., public key encryption with keyword search. Such attribute enabled searchable encryption is most suitable for applications where the changing of privileges is done once in a while. However, to date, no efficient and secure scheme is available in the literature that is suitable for these applications where changing privileges are done frequently. In this paper our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we propose a new PEKS scheme for string search, which, unlike the previous constructions, is free from bi-linear mapping and is efficient by 97% compared to PEKS for string search proposed by Ray et.al in TrustCom 2017. Secondly, we introduce role based access control (RBAC) to multi-user PEKS, where an arbitrary group of users can search and access the encrypted files depending upon roles. We termed this integrated scheme as R-PEKS. The efficiency of R-PEKS over the PEKS scheme is up to 90%. We provide formal security proofs for the different components of R-PEKS and validate these schemes using a commercial dataset
Identity Management and Authorization Infrastructure in Secure Mobile Access to Electronic Health Records
We live in an age of the mobile paradigm of anytime/anywhere access, as the mobile device
is the most ubiquitous device that people now hold. Due to their portability, availability, easy
of use, communication, access and sharing of information within various domains and areas of
our daily lives, the acceptance and adoption of these devices is still growing. However, due to
their potential and raising numbers, mobile devices are a growing target for attackers and, like
other technologies, mobile applications are still vulnerable.
Health information systems are composed with tools and software to collect, manage, analyze
and process medical information (such as electronic health records and personal health records).
Therefore, such systems can empower the performance and maintenance of health services,
promoting availability, readability, accessibility and data sharing of vital information about a
patients overall medical history, between geographic fragmented health services. Quick access
to information presents a great importance in the health sector, as it accelerates work processes,
resulting in better time utilization. Additionally, it may increase the quality of care.
However health information systems store and manage highly sensitive data, which raises serious
concerns regarding patients privacy and safety, and may explain the still increasing number
of malicious incidents reports within the health domain.
Data related to health information systems are highly sensitive and subject to severe legal
and regulatory restrictions, that aim to protect the individual rights and privacy of patients.
Along side with these legislations, security requirements must be analyzed and measures implemented.
Within the necessary security requirements to access health data, secure authentication,
identity management and access control are essential to provide adequate means to
protect data from unauthorized accesses. However, besides the use of simple authentication
models, traditional access control models are commonly based on predefined access policies
and roles, and are inflexible. This results in uniform access control decisions through people,
different type of devices, environments and situational conditions, and across enterprises, location
and time.
Although already existent models allow to ensure the needs of the health care systems, they still
lack components for dynamicity and privacy protection, which leads to not have desire levels
of security and to the patient not to have a full and easy control of his privacy. Within this
master thesis, after a deep research and review of the stat of art, was published a novel dynamic
access control model, Socio-Technical Risk-Adaptable Access Control modEl (SoTRAACE),
which can model the inherent differences and security requirements that are present in this
thesis. To do this, SoTRAACE aggregates attributes from various domains to help performing
a risk assessment at the moment of the request. The assessment of the risk factors identified
in this work is based in a Delphi Study. A set of security experts from various domains were
selected, to classify the impact in the risk assessment of each attribute that SoTRAACE aggregates.
SoTRAACE was integrated in an architecture with requirements well-founded, and based
in the best recommendations and standards (OWASP, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-57), as well based in
deep review of the state-of-art. The architecture is further targeted with the essential security
analysis and the threat model. As proof of concept, the proposed access control model was implemented within the user-centric
architecture, with two mobile prototypes for several types of accesses by patients and healthcare
professionals, as well the web servers that handles the access requests, authentication and
identity management.
The proof of concept shows that the model works as expected, with transparency, assuring privacy
and data control to the user without impact for user experience and interaction. It is clear
that the model can be extended to other industry domains, and new levels of risks or attributes
can be added because it is modular. The architecture also works as expected, assuring secure
authentication with multifactor, and secure data share/access based in SoTRAACE decisions.
The communication channel that SoTRAACE uses was also protected with a digital certificate.
At last, the architecture was tested within different Android versions, tested with static and
dynamic analysis and with tests with security tools.
Future work includes the integration of health data standards and evaluating the proposed system
by collecting users’ opinion after releasing the system to real world.Hoje em dia vivemos em um paradigma móvel de acesso em qualquer lugar/hora, sendo que
os dispositivos móveis são a tecnologia mais presente no dia a dia da sociedade. Devido à sua
portabilidade, disponibilidade, fácil manuseamento, poder de comunicação, acesso e partilha
de informação referentes a várias áreas e domínios das nossas vidas, a aceitação e integração
destes dispositivos é cada vez maior. No entanto, devido ao seu potencial e aumento do número
de utilizadores, os dispositivos móveis são cada vez mais alvos de ataques, e tal como outras
tecnologias, aplicações móveis continuam a ser vulneráveis.
Sistemas de informação de saúde são compostos por ferramentas e softwares que permitem
recolher, administrar, analisar e processar informação médica (tais como documentos de saúde
eletrónicos). Portanto, tais sistemas podem potencializar a performance e a manutenção dos
serviços de saúde, promovendo assim a disponibilidade, acessibilidade e a partilha de dados
vitais referentes ao registro médico geral dos pacientes, entre serviços e instituições que estão
geograficamente fragmentadas. O rápido acesso a informações médicas apresenta uma grande
importância para o setor da saúde, dado que acelera os processos de trabalho, resultando assim
numa melhor eficiência na utilização do tempo e recursos. Consequentemente haverá uma
melhor qualidade de tratamento. Porém os sistemas de informação de saúde armazenam e
manuseiam dados bastantes sensíveis, o que levanta sérias preocupações referentes à privacidade
e segurança do paciente. Assim se explica o aumento de incidentes maliciosos dentro do
domínio da saúde.
Os dados de saúde são altamente sensíveis e são sujeitos a severas leis e restrições regulamentares,
que pretendem assegurar a proteção dos direitos e privacidade dos pacientes, salvaguardando
os seus dados de saúde. Juntamente com estas legislações, requerimentos de segurança
devem ser analisados e medidas implementadas. Dentro dos requerimentos necessários
para aceder aos dados de saúde, uma autenticação segura, gestão de identidade e controlos de
acesso são essenciais para fornecer meios adequados para a proteção de dados contra acessos
não autorizados. No entanto, além do uso de modelos simples de autenticação, os modelos
tradicionais de controlo de acesso são normalmente baseados em políticas de acesso e cargos
pré-definidos, e são inflexíveis. Isto resulta em decisões de controlo de acesso uniformes para
diferentes pessoas, tipos de dispositivo, ambientes e condições situacionais, empresas, localizações
e diferentes alturas no tempo. Apesar dos modelos existentes permitirem assegurar
algumas necessidades dos sistemas de saúde, ainda há escassez de componentes para accesso
dinâmico e proteção de privacidade , o que resultam em níveis de segurança não satisfatórios e
em o paciente não ter controlo directo e total sobre a sua privacidade e documentos de saúde.
Dentro desta tese de mestrado, depois da investigação e revisão intensiva do estado da arte,
foi publicado um modelo inovador de controlo de acesso, chamado SoTRAACE, que molda as
diferenças de acesso inerentes e requerimentos de segurança presentes nesta tese. Para isto,
o SoTRAACE agrega atributos de vários ambientes e domínios que ajudam a executar uma avaliação
de riscos, no momento em que os dados são requisitados. A avaliação dos fatores de risco
identificados neste trabalho são baseados num estudo de Delphi. Um conjunto de peritos de
segurança de vários domínios industriais foram selecionados, para classificar o impacto de cada
atributo que o SoTRAACE agrega. O SoTRAACE foi integrado numa arquitectura para acesso a
dados médicos, com requerimentos bem fundados, baseados nas melhores normas e recomendações (OWASP, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-57), e em revisões intensivas do estado da arte. Esta
arquitectura é posteriormente alvo de uma análise de segurança e modelos de ataque.
Como prova deste conceito, o modelo de controlo de acesso proposto é implementado juntamente
com uma arquitetura focada no utilizador, com dois protótipos para aplicações móveis,
que providênciam vários tipos de acesso de pacientes e profissionais de saúde. A arquitetura é
constituída também por servidores web que tratam da gestão de dados, controlo de acesso e
autenticação e gestão de identidade. O resultado final mostra que o modelo funciona como esperado,
com transparência, assegurando a privacidade e o controlo de dados para o utilizador,
sem ter impacto na sua interação e experiência. Consequentemente este modelo pode-se extender
para outros setores industriais, e novos níveis de risco ou atributos podem ser adicionados
a este mesmo, por ser modular. A arquitetura também funciona como esperado, assegurando
uma autenticação segura com multi-fator, acesso e partilha de dados segura baseado em decisões
do SoTRAACE. O canal de comunicação que o SoTRAACE usa foi também protegido com
um certificado digital.
A arquitectura foi testada em diferentes versões de Android, e foi alvo de análise estática,
dinâmica e testes com ferramentas de segurança.
Para trabalho futuro está planeado a integração de normas de dados de saúde e a avaliação do
sistema proposto, através da recolha de opiniões de utilizadores no mundo real
Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used
by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes,
implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed
articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the
Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain
as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit,
the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually
performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for
user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache,
fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on
mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they
are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also
show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real
names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why
tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users (price
discrimination, assessing financial credibility, determining insurance
coverage, government surveillance, and identity theft). For each of the
tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Apart from describing the
methods and tools used for keeping the personal data away from being tracked,
we also present several tools that were used for research purposes - their main
goal is to discover how and by which entity the users are being tracked on
their desktop computers or smartphones, provide this information to the users,
and visualize it in an accessible and easy to follow way. Finally, we present
the currently proposed future approaches to track the user and show that they
can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Comment: 29 pages, 212 reference
Generic and Parameterizable Service for Remote Configuration of Mobile Phones Using Near Field Communication
Os serviços nos nossos dispositivos móveis têm aumentado em número e complexidade nos últimos anos. Utilizadores menos experientes sentem dificuldade em tirar total partido destes serviços. De forma a atenuar este problema, é necessário encontrar novas e inovadoras formas que permitam assistir o utilizador no processo de configuração. Para além disso, vivemos numa sociedade do imediato. As pessoas querem que o acesso aos recursos seja rápido, simples e seguro. É também sabido que grande parte dos utilizadores são leigos no que diz respeito à utilização de funcionalidades avançadas dos dispositivos móveis, o que resulta em alguma inércia no uso de certas aplicações e funcionalidades.O Near Field Communication oferece uma oportunidade única para introduzir novos paradigmas de negócio no que diz respeito à interação e facilidade de utilização. Esta dissertação especifica um serviço genérico e parametrizável para a configuração remota de dispositivos.Mobile services have increased both in number and complexity in the past few years. This means that in order to get the most out of these services, less experienced users will have a hard time configuring them by hand. To address this issue, we must find new and innovative solutions to assist the user in this process. Furthermore, we live in a society of the immediate. Everyone wants access to resources to be fast, simple and secure. It is also known that most of the users are laymen when referring to advanced configuration of mobile phone, resulting in some inertia in the use of applications and functionalities.Near Field Communication (NFC) provides an unique opportunity to introduce new business paradigms in terms of interaction and ease of use. This dissertation specifies a generic and parameterizable service for remote configuration of mobile devices using Near Field Communication, which requires minimal user intervention
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