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

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

Semantic security: specification and enforcement of semantic policies for security-driven collaborations

Collaborative research can often have demands on finer-grained security that go beyond the authentication-only paradigm as typified by many e-Infrastructure/Grid based solutions. Supporting finer-grained access control is often essential for domains where the specification and subsequent enforcement of authorization policies is needed. The clinical domain is one area in particular where this is so. However it is the case that existing security authorization solutions are fragile, inflexible and difficult to establish and maintain. As a result they often do not meet the needs of real world collaborations where robustness and flexibility of policy specification and enforcement, and ease of maintenance are essential. In this paper we present results of the JISC funded Advanced Grid Authorisation through Semantic Technologies (AGAST) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/agast) and show how semantic-based approaches to security policy specification and enforcement can address many of the limitations with existing security solutions. These are demonstrated into the clinical trials domain through the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/votes) and the epidemiological domain through the JISC funded SeeGEO project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/seegeo)

A JSON Token-Based Authentication and Access Management Schema for Cloud SaaS Applications

Cloud computing is significantly reshaping the computing industry built around core concepts such as virtualization, processing power, connectivity and elasticity to store and share IT resources via a broad network. It has emerged as the key technology that unleashes the potency of Big Data, Internet of Things, Mobile and Web Applications, and other related technologies, but it also comes with its challenges - such as governance, security, and privacy. This paper is focused on the security and privacy challenges of cloud computing with specific reference to user authentication and access management for cloud SaaS applications. The suggested model uses a framework that harnesses the stateless and secure nature of JWT for client authentication and session management. Furthermore, authorized access to protected cloud SaaS resources have been efficiently managed. Accordingly, a Policy Match Gate (PMG) component and a Policy Activity Monitor (PAM) component have been introduced. In addition, other subcomponents such as a Policy Validation Unit (PVU) and a Policy Proxy DB (PPDB) have also been established for optimized service delivery. A theoretical analysis of the proposed model portrays a system that is secure, lightweight and highly scalable for improved cloud resource security and management.Comment: 6 Page

IPv6 Network Mobility

Network Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting has been used since before the days of the Internet as we know it today. Authentication asks the question, “Who or what are you?” Authorization asks, “What are you allowed to do?” And fi nally, accounting wants to know, “What did you do?” These fundamental security building blocks are being used in expanded ways today. The fi rst part of this two-part series focused on the overall concepts of AAA, the elements involved in AAA communications, and highlevel approaches to achieving specifi c AAA goals. It was published in IPJ Volume 10, No. 1[0]. This second part of the series discusses the protocols involved, specifi c applications of AAA, and considerations for the future of AAA