CamFlow: Managed Data-sharing for Cloud Services

A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud services within `Internet of Things' architectures is driving the requirements for both protection and cross-application data sharing. These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a crucial issue once data has left its owner's control by cloud-hosted applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing owners' dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide visibility over data flows. [...]Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Identifying Native Applications with High Assurance

The work described in this paper investigates the problem of identifying and deterring stealthy malicious processes on a host. We point out the lack of strong application iden- tication in main stream operating systems. We solve the application identication problem by proposing a novel iden- tication model in which user-level applications are required to present identication proofs at run time to be authenti- cated by the kernel using an embedded secret key. The se- cret key of an application is registered with a trusted kernel using a key registrar and is used to uniquely authenticate and authorize the application. We present a protocol for secure authentication of applications. Additionally, we de- velop a system call monitoring architecture that uses our model to verify the identity of applications when making critical system calls. Our system call monitoring can be integrated with existing policy specication frameworks to enforce application-level access rights. We implement and evaluate a prototype of our monitoring architecture in Linux as device drivers with nearly no modication of the ker- nel. The results from our extensive performance evaluation shows that our prototype incurs low overhead, indicating the feasibility of our model

Problems faced in Communicate set up of Coordinator with GUI and Dispatcher in NCTUns network simulator

Distributed Emulation can be carried out between real world applications with a simulator. NCTUns-6.0 is a simulator based on kernel re-entering and distributed Emulation simulation methodology, with this methodology a more realistic network model can be simulated for real time applications. Coordinator is a Program that sets up communication between the GUI and Dispatcher in NCTUns-6.0 I, a network simulator running on Fedora-13. We have given in this paper how problems faced in communication set up of Coordinator with  GUI and Dispatcher are overcomed . This paper focuses on how to overcome the above problems and execute simulations in real time. This paper also deals with KDE, SELINUX, iptables, environment variables and X-server for NCTUns-6.0 simulation engine Keywords: Coordinator, Dispatcher, nctunsclient, NCTUns-6.0, Fedora-12, SELinux, IPtable

Enforcing Security and Assurance Properties in Cloud Environment

International audienceBefore deploying their infrastructure (resources, data, communications, ...) on a Cloud computing platform, companies want to be sure that it will be properly secured. At deployment time, the company provides a security policy describing its security requirements through a set of properties. Once its infrastructure deployed, the company want to be assured that this policy is applied and enforced. But describing and enforcing security properties and getting strong evidences of it is a complex task. To address this issue, in [1], we have proposed a language that can be used to express both security and assurance properties on distributed resources. Then, we have shown how these global properties can be cut into a set of properties to be enforced locally. In this paper, we show how these local properties can be used to automatically configure security mechanisms. Our language is context-based which allows it to be easily adapted to any resource naming systems e.g., Linux and Android (with SELinux) or PostgreSQL. Moreover, by abstracting low-level functionalities (e.g., deny write to a file) through capabilities, our language remains independent from the security mechanisms. These capabilities can then be combined into security and assurance properties in order to provide high-level functionalities, such as confidentiality or integrity. Furthermore, we propose a global architecture that receives these properties and automatically configures the security and assurance mechanisms accordingly. Finally, we express the security and assurance policies of an industrial environment for a commercialized product and show how its security is enforced