A trustworthy mobile agent infrastructure for network management

Despite several advantages inherent in mobile-agent-based approaches to network management as compared to traditional SNMP-based approaches, industry is reluctant to adopt the mobile agent paradigm as a replacement for the existing manager-agent model; the management community requires an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, use of mobile agents. Furthermore, security for distributed management is a major concern; agent-based management systems inherit the security risks of mobile agents. We have developed a Java-based mobile agent infrastructure for network management that enables the safe integration of mobile agents with the SNMP protocol. The security of the system has been evaluated under agent to agent-platform and agent to agent attacks and has proved trustworthy in the performance of network management tasks

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

A Flexible and Secure Deployment Framework for Distributed Applications

This paper describes an implemented system which is designed to support the deployment of applications offering distributed services, comprising a number of distributed components. This is achieved by creating high level placement and topology descriptions which drive tools that deploy applications consisting of components running on multiple hosts. The system addresses issues of heterogeneity by providing abstractions over host-specific attributes yielding a homogeneous run-time environment into which components may be deployed. The run-time environments provide secure binding mechanisms that permit deployed components to bind to stored data and services on the hosts on which they are running.Comment: 2nd International Working Conference on Component Deployment (CD 2004), Edinburgh, Scotlan

MESURE Tool to benchmark Java Card platforms

The advent of the Java Card standard has been a major turning point in smart card technology. With the growing acceptance of this standard, understanding the performance behavior of these platforms is becoming crucial. To meet this need, we present in this paper a novel benchmarking framework to test and evaluate the performance of Java Card platforms. MESURE tool is the first framework which accuracy and effectiveness are independent from the particular Java Card platform tested and CAD used.Comment: International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Volume 1, pp49-57, August 200

Formally based semi-automatic implementation of an open security protocol

International audienceThis paper presents an experiment in which an implementation of the client side of the SSH Transport Layer Protocol (SSH-TLP) was semi-automatically derived according to a model-driven development paradigm that leverages formal methods in order to obtain high correctness assurance. The approach used in the experiment starts with the formalization of the protocol at an abstract level. This model is then formally proved to fulfill the desired secrecy and authentication properties by using the ProVerif prover. Finally, a sound Java implementation is semi-automatically derived from the verified model using an enhanced version of the Spi2Java framework. The resulting implementation correctly interoperates with third party servers, and its execution time is comparable with that of other manually developed Java SSH-TLP client implementations. This case study demonstrates that the adopted model-driven approach is viable even for a real security protocol, despite the complexity of the models needed in order to achieve an interoperable implementation

Formal Verification of Security Protocol Implementations: A Survey

Automated formal verification of security protocols has been mostly focused on analyzing high-level abstract models which, however, are significantly different from real protocol implementations written in programming languages. Recently, some researchers have started investigating techniques that bring automated formal proofs closer to real implementations. This paper surveys these attempts, focusing on approaches that target the application code that implements protocol logic, rather than the libraries that implement cryptography. According to these approaches, libraries are assumed to correctly implement some models. The aim is to derive formal proofs that, under this assumption, give assurance about the application code that implements the protocol logic. The two main approaches of model extraction and code generation are presented, along with the main techniques adopted for each approac