Enhancing Fault / Intrusion Tolerance through Design and Configuration Diversity

Fault/intrusion tolerance is usually the only viable way of improving the system dependability and security in the presence of continuously evolving threats. Many of the solutions in the literature concern a specific snapshot in the production or deployment of a fault-tolerant system and no immediate considerations are made about how the system should evolve to deal with novel threats. In this paper we outline and evaluate a set of operating systems’ and applications’ reconfiguration rules which can be used to modify the state of a system replica prior to deployment or in between recoveries, and hence increase the replicas chance of a longer intrusion-free operation

FOREVER: Fault/intrusiOn REmoVal through Evolution & Recovery

The goal of the FOREVER project is to develop a service for Fault/intrusiOn REmoVal through Evolution & Recovery. In order to achieve this goal, our work addresses three main tasks: the definition of the FOREVER service architecture; the analysis of how diversity techniques can improve resilience; and the evaluation of the FOREVER service. The FOREVER service is an important contribution to intrustion-tolerant replication middleware and significantly enhances the resilience

Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

Diverse intrusion-tolerant database replication

Tese de mestrado em Segurança Informática, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2012A combinação da replicação de bases de dados com mecanismos de tolerância a falhas bizantinas ainda é um campo de pesquisa recente com projetos a surgirem nestes últimos anos. No entanto, a maioria dos protótipos desenvolvidos ou se focam em problemas muito específicos, ou são baseados em suposições que são muito difíceis de garantir numa situação do mundo real, como por exemplo ter um componente confiável. Nesta tese apresentamos DivDB, um sistema de replicação de bases de dados diverso e tolerante a intrusões. O sistema está desenhado para ser incorporado dentro de um driver JDBC, o qual irá abstrair o utilizador de qualquer complexidade adicional dos mecanismos de tolerância a falhas bizantinas. O DivDB baseia-se na combinação de máquinas de estados replicadas com um algoritmo de processamento de transações, a fim de melhorar o seu desempenho. Para além disso, no DivDB é possível ligar cada réplica a um sistema de gestão de base de dados diferente, proporcionando assim diversidade ao sistema. Propusemos, resolvemos e implementamos três problemas em aberto, existentes na conceção de um sistema de gestão de base de dados replicado: autenticação, processamento de transações e transferência de estado. Estas características torna o DivDB exclusivo, pois é o único sistema que compreende essas três funcionalidades implementadas num sistema de base de dados replicado. A nossa implementação é suficientemente robusta para funcionar de forma segura num simples sistema de processamento de transações online. Para testar isso, utilizou-se o TPC-C, uma ferramenta de benchmarking que simula esse tipo de ambientes.The combination of database replication with Byzantine fault tolerance mechanism is a recent field of research with projects appearing in the last few years. However most of the prototypes produced are either focused on very specific problems or are based on assumptions that are very hard to accomplish in a real world scenario (e.g., trusted component). In this thesis we present DivDB, a Diverse Intrusion-Tolerant Database Replication system. It is designed to be incorporated inside a JDBC driver so that it abstracts the user from any added complexity from Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism. DivDB is based in State Machine Replication combined with a transaction handling algorithm in order to enhance its performance. DivDB is also able to have different database systems connected at each replica, enabling to achieve diversity. We proposed, solved and implemented three open problems in the design of a replicated database system: authentication, transaction handling and state-transfer. This makes DivDB unique since it is the only system that comprises all these three features in a single database replication system. Our implementation is robust enough to operate reliably in a simple Online Transaction Processing system. To test that, we used TPC-C, a benchmark tool that simulates that kind of environments

Security and Privacy Issues of Big Data

This chapter revises the most important aspects in how computing infrastructures should be configured and intelligently managed to fulfill the most notably security aspects required by Big Data applications. One of them is privacy. It is a pertinent aspect to be addressed because users share more and more personal data and content through their devices and computers to social networks and public clouds. So, a secure framework to social networks is a very hot topic research. This last topic is addressed in one of the two sections of the current chapter with case studies. In addition, the traditional mechanisms to support security such as firewalls and demilitarized zones are not suitable to be applied in computing systems to support Big Data. SDN is an emergent management solution that could become a convenient mechanism to implement security in Big Data systems, as we show through a second case study at the end of the chapter. This also discusses current relevant work and identifies open issues.Comment: In book Handbook of Research on Trends and Future Directions in Big Data and Web Intelligence, IGI Global, 201

Validating sensor nodes in Wireless sensor networks using scoring algorithm

Sensor networks are frequently used to collect data in the environment such as agriculture, forest monitoring, healthcare, and military battlefield. In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), nodes are used to monitor the environment and gather data where sinks can be used to collect the data from the sensor nodes and transfer them to the back-end server for processing. These sensible data are moved from one node to another node in the network. Such data should not be considered for public accessibility by the nodes in the network where the visibility and ease of access can only be achieved through either authenticated nodes or right authenticated persons. As sensor node can collect an important data (such as medical or military data), security is a critical issue. Hence, the sensor network needs a secure authentication mechanism to solve this problem and protects the unauthorized access. Therefore, the authentication mechanism used by the node and the sink node must be very efficient in terms of both computational time and energy consumptions. This is especially important for nodes with computing capabilities and battery lifetime is very low. Moreover, for extremely lightweight devices, efficient security solutions with simple mathematics operation and low energy consumptions are still required. To make an authentication decision in real-time, a scoring algorithm examines the user model and the user’s recent behavior, and outputs a score indicating the likelihood that the correct user is using the device. The score is used to make an authentication decision