Modelling Security of Critical Infrastructures: A Survivability Assessment

Critical infrastructures, usually designed to handle disruptions caused by human errors or random acts of nature, define assets whose normal operation must be guaranteed to maintain its essential services for human daily living. Malicious intended attacks to these targets need to be considered during system design. To face these situations, defence plans must be developed in advance. In this paper, we present a Unified Modelling Language profile, named SecAM, that enables the modelling and security specification for critical infrastructures during the early phases (requirements, design) of system development life cycle. SecAM enables security assessment, through survivability analysis, of different security solutions before system deployment. As a case study, we evaluate the survivability of the Saudi Arabia crude-oil network under two different attack scenarios. The stochastic analysis, carried out with Generalized Stochastic Petri nets, quantitatively estimates the minimization of attack damages on the crude-oil network

Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.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. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Perfomance Analysis and Resource Optimisation of Critical Systems Modelled by Petri Nets

Un sistema crítico debe cumplir con su misión a pesar de la presencia de problemas de seguridad. Este tipo de sistemas se suele desplegar en entornos heterogéneos, donde pueden ser objeto de intentos de intrusión, robo de información confidencial u otro tipo de ataques. Los sistemas, en general, tienen que ser rediseñados después de que ocurra un incidente de seguridad, lo que puede conducir a consecuencias graves, como el enorme costo de reimplementar o reprogramar todo el sistema, así como las posibles pérdidas económicas. Así, la seguridad ha de ser concebida como una parte integral del desarrollo de sistemas y como una necesidad singular de lo que el sistema debe realizar (es decir, un requisito no funcional del sistema). Así pues, al diseñar sistemas críticos es fundamental estudiar los ataques que se pueden producir y planificar cómo reaccionar frente a ellos, con el fin de mantener el cumplimiento de requerimientos funcionales y no funcionales del sistema. A pesar de que los problemas de seguridad se consideren, también es necesario tener en cuenta los costes incurridos para garantizar un determinado nivel de seguridad en sistemas críticos. De hecho, los costes de seguridad puede ser un factor muy relevante ya que puede abarcar diferentes dimensiones, como el presupuesto, el rendimiento y la fiabilidad. Muchos de estos sistemas críticos que incorporan técnicas de tolerancia a fallos (sistemas FT) para hacer frente a las cuestiones de seguridad son sistemas complejos, que utilizan recursos que pueden estar comprometidos (es decir, pueden fallar) por la activación de los fallos y/o errores provocados por posibles ataques. Estos sistemas pueden ser modelados como sistemas de eventos discretos donde los recursos son compartidos, también llamados sistemas de asignación de recursos. Esta tesis se centra en los sistemas FT con recursos compartidos modelados mediante redes de Petri (Petri nets, PN). Estos sistemas son generalmente tan grandes que el cálculo exacto de su rendimiento se convierte en una tarea de cálculo muy compleja, debido al problema de la explosión del espacio de estados. Como resultado de ello, una tarea que requiere una exploración exhaustiva en el espacio de estados es incomputable (en un plazo prudencial) para sistemas grandes. Las principales aportaciones de esta tesis son tres. Primero, se ofrecen diferentes modelos, usando el Lenguaje Unificado de Modelado (Unified Modelling Language, UML) y las redes de Petri, que ayudan a incorporar las cuestiones de seguridad y tolerancia a fallos en primer plano durante la fase de diseño de los sistemas, permitiendo así, por ejemplo, el análisis del compromiso entre seguridad y rendimiento. En segundo lugar, se proporcionan varios algoritmos para calcular el rendimiento (también bajo condiciones de fallo) mediante el cálculo de cotas de rendimiento superiores, evitando así el problema de la explosión del espacio de estados. Por último, se proporcionan algoritmos para calcular cómo compensar la degradación de rendimiento que se produce ante una situación inesperada en un sistema con tolerancia a fallos

Performance assessment of security mechanisms for cooperative mobile health applications

Mobile health (m-Health) applications aim to deliver healthcare services through mobile applications regardless of time and place. An mHealth application makes use of wireless communications to sustain its health services and often providing a patient-doctor interaction. Therefore, m-Health applications present several challenging issues and constraints, such as, mobile devices battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, network delays, and of most importance, privacy and security concerns. In a typical m-Health system, information transmitted through wireless channels may contain sensitive information such as patient’s clinic history, patient’s personal diseases information (e.g. infectious disease as HIV - human immunodeficiency virus). Carrying such type of information presents many issues related to its privacy and protection. In this work, a cryptographic solution for m-Health applications under a cooperative environment is proposed in order to approach two common drawbacks in mobile health systems: the data privacy and protection. Two different approaches were proposed: i) DE4MHA that aims to guarantee the best confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of mhealth systems users data and ii) eC4MHA that also focuses on assuring and guarantying the m-Health application data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity, although with a different paradigm. While DE4MHA considers a peer-to-peer node message forward, with encryption/decryption tasks on each node, eC4MHA focuses on simply encrypting data at the requester node and decrypting it when it reaches the Web service. It relays information through cooperative mobile nodes, giving them the only strictly required information, in order to be able to forward a request, until it reaches the Web service responsible to manage the request, and possibly answer to that same request. In this sense, the referred solutions aim any mobile health application with cooperation mechanism embedded. For test purposes a specific mobile health application, namely SapoFit, was used. Cryptographic mechanisms were created and integrated in SapoFit application with built in cooperation mechanisms. A performance evaluation of both approaches in a real scenario with different mobile devices is performed and presented in this work. A comparison with the performance evaluations of both solutions is also presented.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)European Community Fund FEDER through COMPETE – Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividad

Application level security enforcement mechanisms for advanced network services

Masteroppgave i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi 2006 - Høgskolen i Agder, GrimstadToday the telecom world and the Internet world are converging. Ericsson has foreseen this convergence and developed a prototype of a service creation and execution environment called ServiceFrame. ServiceFrame is an extension of the ActorFrame framework. ActorFrame features new concepts described in UML 2.0, such as connectors, ports, parts and behaviour inheritance and structured classes. ActorFrame has central components called actors and agents. Actors and agents are modelled and described using the UML 2.0 notation. In ActorFrame and ServiceFrame actors and agents are communicating asynchronously using messages and concurrent state machines. The ServiceFrame developers have always concentrated on making ServiceFrame a framework with distributed components. The developers have not yet focused on the security issues in ServiceFrame. As a result ServiceFrame currently has no security mechanisms for securing actors or agents. This thesis proposes a security protocol and security mechanisms for securing ServiceFrame. The proposed security mechanisms are implemented in a prototype and tested using a test case. The report first gives an introduction to security concepts, such as authentication, authorisation, integrity and confidentiality. The report also describes relevant frameworks and security protocols. The Java programming language is used for developing and implementing the security mechanisms. UML 2.0 is used as the modelling language. At the end of the report the security mechanisms are analysed and discussed. Authentication in ServiecFrame is achieved by using a key exchange protocol with certificates. In the thesis a solution for achieving authorisation is proposed. This thesis only proposes a rudimentary solution which uses access control lists. Integrity and confidentiality are achieved using cryptography and signing of messages. The main conclusion of this thesis is that the security mechanisms proposed can contribute to securing the ServiceFrame framework. The security mechanisms achieve point to point security between two agents. ServiceFrame could be used to secure access to the Parlay gateway and telecom services. Fundamental in the security mechanisms is an extended variant of the Needham-Schroeder-Lowe public key protocol. The main contribution of this thesis has been to introduce security in ServiceFrame, which previously had not been implemented. The security mechanisms can be used by developers of ServiceFrame to accomplish security in their services. Commercial systems require focus on security to secure both end users and the service providers. The thesis work may contribute to the establishment of ServiceFrame in commercially related products in the future. The thesis has shown that ServiceFrame does not have security mechanisms and that achieving security is essential for ServiceFrame. The thesis has also shown that some of the proposed security mechanisms can be implemented in the framework. It has also shown how security concepts can be implemented and used by distributed components

Smartphone software for department of computer science

The presented document provides an overview of the Smartphone Software for Department of Computer Science project development through out several phases: analysis of the project proposal, preliminary study of the concepts involved in the project, design decisions and modeling, implementation, experiments and conclusions obtained in the end, as well as a reflection on possible future system improvements. The final version of the system, which was built after the design and implementation decisions made through out the development of the project, is a prototype mainly composed of an application for Android smartphones leaning on a distributed architecture in order to provide all its expected functionalities. Thus, the system is based on a mixture of the two main distributed systems architectural models: client-server and peer-to-peer. The functionalities that lean on the client-server architecture are those whose data are relative to information of general interest and need to be always (ideally) available: consulting news, information and schedules for courses, frequently asked questions, maps and indoors positioning. On the other hand, functionalities such as the chat system and the possibility of contacting with the students of a certain course depend on the availability of the users, so a peer-to-peer architectural model was developed to support them. Regarding the system functionalities, the in-door localization and the chat system were determined as the most relevant ones. With the aim to provide those functionalities, the choice made was to implement an in-door positioning based on the RedPin model and, on the other hand, to make use of an already existing Java solution to build a chat system by means of multicast DNS and DNS Service Discovery: JmDNS

A framework for cryptography algorithms on mobile devices

Mobile communication devices have become a popular tool for gathering and disseminating information and data. With the evidence of the growth of wireless technology and a need for more flexible, customizable and better-optimised security schemes, it is evident that connection-based security such as HTTPS may not be sufficient. In order to provide sufficient security at the application layer, developers need access to a cryptography package. Such packages are available as third party mobile cryptographic toolkits or are supported natively on the mobile device. Typically mobile cryptographic packages have reduced their number of API methods to keep the package lightweight in size, but consequently making it quite complex to use. As a result developers could easily misuse a method which can weaken the entire security of a system without knowing it. Aside from the complexities in the API, mobile cryptography packages often do not apply sound cryptography within the implementation of the algorithms thus causing vulnerabilities in its utilization and initialization. Although FIPS 140-2 and CAPI suggest guidelines on how cryptographic algorithms should be implemented, they do not define the guidelines for implementing and using cryptography in a mobile environment. In our study, we do not define new cryptographic algorithms, instead, we investigate how sound cryptography can be applied practically in a mobile application environment and developed a framework called Linca (which stands for Logical Integration of Cryptographic Architectures) that can be used as a mobile cryptographic package to demonstrate our findings. The benefit that Linca has is that it hides the complexity of making incorrect cryptographic algorithm decisions, cryptographic algorithm initialization and utilization and key management, while maintaining a small size. Linca also applies sound cryptographic fundamentals internally within the framework, which radiates these benefits outwards at the API. Because Linca is a framework, certain architecture and design patterns are applied internally so that the cryptographic mechanisms and algorithms can be easily maintained. Linca showed better results when evaluated against two mobile cryptography API packages namely Bouncy Castle API and Secure and Trust Service API in terms of security and design. We demonstrate the applicability of Linca on using two realistic examples that cover securing network channels and on-device data.Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2007.Computer ScienceMScunrestricte

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

VThreads: A novel VLIW chip multiprocessor with hardware-assisted PThreads

We discuss VThreads, a novel VLIW CMP with hardware-assisted shared-memory Thread support. VThreads supports Instruction Level Parallelism via static multiple-issue and Thread Level Parallelism via hardware-assisted POSIX Threads along with extensive customization. It allows the instantiation of tightlycoupled streaming accelerators and supports up to 7-address Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output instruction extensions. VThreads is designed in technology-independent Register-Transfer-Level VHDL and prototyped on 40 nm and 28 nm Field-Programmable gate arrays. It was evaluated against a PThreads-based multiprocessor based on the Sparc-V8 ISA. On a 65 nm ASIC implementation VThreads achieves up to x7.2 performance increase on synthetic benchmarks, x5 on a parallel Mandelbrot implementation, 66% better on a threaded JPEG implementation, 79% better on an edge-detection benchmark and ~13% improvement on DES compared to the Leon3MP CMP. In the range of 2 to 8 cores VThreads demonstrates a post-route (statistical) power reduction between 65% to 57% at an area increase of 1.2%-10% for 1-8 cores, compared to a similarly-configured Leon3MP CMP. This combination of micro-architectural features, scalability, extensibility, hardware support for low-latency PThreads, power efficiency and area make the processor an attractive proposition for low-power, deeply-embedded applications requiring minimum OS support