Trusted data path protecting shared data in virtualized distributed systems

When sharing data across multiple sites, service applications should not be trusted automatically. Services that are suspected of faulty, erroneous, or malicious behaviors, or that run on systems that may be compromised, should not be able to gain access to protected data or entrusted with the same data access rights as others. This thesis proposes a context flow model that controls the information flow in a distributed system. Each service application along with its surrounding context in a distributed system is treated as a controllable principal. This thesis defines a trust-based access control model that controls the information exchange between these principals. An online monitoring framework is used to evaluate the trustworthiness of the service applications and the underlining systems. An external communication interception runtime framework enforces trust-based access control transparently for the entire system.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Karsten Schwan; Committee Member: Douglas M. Blough; Committee Member: Greg Eisenhauer; Committee Member: Mustaque Ahamad; Committee Member: Wenke Le

Federated Access Management for Collaborative Environments

abstract: Access control has been historically recognized as an effective technique for ensuring that computer systems preserve important security properties. Recently, attribute-based access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner. However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

UNION: A Trust Model Distinguishing Intentional and Unintentional Misbehavior in Inter-UAV Communication

[EN] Ensuring the desired level of security is an important issue in all communicating systems, and it becomes more challenging in wireless environments. Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) are an emerging type of mobile network that is built using energy-restricted devices. Hence, the communications interface used and that computation complexity are additional factors to consider when designing secure protocols for these networks. In the literature, various solutions have been proposed to ensure secure and reliable internode communications, and these FANET nodes are known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In general, these UAVs are often detected as malicious due to an unintentional misbehavior related to the physical features of the UAVs, the communication mediums, or the network interface. In this paper, we propose a new context-aware trust-based solution to distinguish between intentional and unintentional UAV misbehavior. The main goal is to minimize the generated error ratio while meeting the desired security levels. Our proposal simultaneously establishes the inter-UAV trust and estimates the current context in terms of UAV energy, mobility pattern, and enqueued packets, in order to ensure full context awareness in the overall honesty evaluation. In addition, based on computed trust and context metrics, we also propose a new inter-UAV packet delivery strategy. Simulations conducted using NS2.35 evidence the efficiency of our proposal, called UNION., at ensuring high detection ratios > 87% and high accuracy with reduced end-to-end delay, clearly outperforming previous proposals known as RPM, T-CLAIDS, and CATrust.This research is partially supported by the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) under Grant no. 31T065.Barka, E.; Kerrache, CA.; Lagraa, N.; Lakas, A.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano, J. (2018). UNION: A Trust Model Distinguishing Intentional and Unintentional Misbehavior in Inter-UAV Communication. Journal of Advanced Transportation. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/7475357S112Ghazzai, H., Ben Ghorbel, M., Kadri, A., Hossain, M. J., & Menouar, H. (2017). Energy-Efficient Management of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Underlay Cognitive Radio Systems. IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, 1(4), 434-443. doi:10.1109/tgcn.2017.2750721Sharma, V., & Kumar, R. (2016). Cooperative frameworks and network models for flying ad hoc networks: a survey. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 29(4), e3931. doi:10.1002/cpe.3931Sun, J., Wang, W., Kou, L., Lin, Y., Zhang, L., Da, Q., & Chen, L. (2017). A data authentication scheme for UAV ad hoc network communication. The Journal of Supercomputing, 76(6), 4041-4056. doi:10.1007/s11227-017-2179-3He, D., Chan, S., & Guizani, M. (2017). Drone-Assisted Public Safety Networks: The Security Aspect. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(8), 218-223. doi:10.1109/mcom.2017.1600799cmSeong-Woo Kim, & Seung-Woo Seo. (2012). Cooperative Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle Control for Spatially Secure Group Communications. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 30(5), 870-882. doi:10.1109/jsac.2012.120604Singh, A., Maheshwari, M., Nikhil, & Kumar, N. (2011). Security and Trust Management in MANET. Communications in Computer and Information Science, 384-387. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-20573-6_67Kerrache, C. A., Calafate, C. T., Cano, J.-C., Lagraa, N., & Manzoni, P. (2016). Trust Management for Vehicular Networks: An Adversary-Oriented Overview. IEEE Access, 4, 9293-9307. doi:10.1109/access.2016.2645452Li, W., & Song, H. (2016). ART: An Attack-Resistant Trust Management Scheme for Securing Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 17(4), 960-969. doi:10.1109/tits.2015.2494017Raghunathan, V., Schurgers, C., Sung Park, & Srivastava, M. B. (2002). Energy-aware wireless microsensor networks. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 19(2), 40-50. doi:10.1109/79.985679Feeney, L. M. (2001). Mobile Networks and Applications, 6(3), 239-249. doi:10.1023/a:1011474616255De Rango, F., Guerriero, F., & Fazio, P. (2012). Link-Stability and Energy Aware Routing Protocol in Distributed Wireless Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 23(4), 713-726. doi:10.1109/tpds.2010.160Hyytia, E., Lassila, P., & Virtamo, J. (2006). Spatial node distribution of the random waypoint mobility model with applications. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 5(6), 680-694. doi:10.1109/tmc.2006.86Wang, Y., Chen, I.-R., Cho, J.-H., Swami, A., Lu, Y.-C., Lu, C.-T., & Tsai, J. J. P. (2018). CATrust: Context-Aware Trust Management for Service-Oriented Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 11(6), 908-921. doi:10.1109/tsc.2016.2587259Kumar, N., & Chilamkurti, N. (2014). Collaborative trust aware intelligent intrusion detection in VANETs. Computers & Electrical Engineering, 40(6), 1981-1996. doi:10.1016/j.compeleceng.2014.01.00

Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

A flexible architecture for privacy-aware trust management

In service-oriented systems a constellation of services cooperate, sharing potentially sensitive information and responsibilities. Cooperation is only possible if the different participants trust each other. As trust may depend on many different factors, in a flexible framework for Trust Management (TM) trust must be computed by combining different types of information. In this paper we describe the TAS3 TM framework which integrates independent TM systems into a single trust decision point. The TM framework supports intricate combinations whilst still remaining easily extensible. It also provides a unified trust evaluation interface to the (authorization framework of the) services. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach by integrating three distinct TM paradigms: reputation-based TM, credential-based TM, and Key Performance Indicator TM. Finally, we discuss privacy concerns in TM systems and the directions to be taken for the definition of a privacy-friendly TM architecture.\u