CRiBAC: Community-centric role interaction based access control model

As one of the most efficient solutions to complex and large-scale problems, multi-agent cooperation has been in the limelight for the past few decades. Recently, many research projects have focused on context-aware cooperation to dynamically provide complex services. As cooperation in the multi-agent systems (MASs) becomes more common, guaranteeing the security of such cooperation takes on even greater importance. However, existing security models do not reflect the agents' unique features, including cooperation and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a Community-based Role interaction-based Access Control model (CRiBAC) to allow secure cooperation in MASs. To do this, we refine and extend our preliminary RiBAC model, which was proposed earlier to support secure interactions among agents, by introducing a new concept of interaction permission, and then extend it to CRiBAC to support community-based cooperation among agents. We analyze potential problems related to interaction permissions and propose two approaches to address them. We also propose an administration model to facilitate administration of CRiBAC policies. Finally, we present the implementation of a prototype system based on a sample scenario to assess the proposed work and show its feasibility. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Dynamic deployment of context-aware access control policies for constrained security devices

Securing the access to a server, guaranteeing a certain level of protection over an encrypted communication channel, executing particular counter measures when attacks are detected are examples of security requirements. Such requirements are identi ed based on organizational purposes and expectations in terms of resource access and availability and also on system vulnerabilities and threats. All these requirements belong to the so-called security policy. Deploying the policy means enforcing, i.e., con guring, those security components and mechanisms so that the system behavior be nally the one speci ed by the policy. The deployment issue becomes more di cult as the growing organizational requirements and expectations generally leave behind the integration of new security functionalities in the information system: the information system will not always embed the necessary security functionalities for the proper deployment of contextual security requirements. To overcome this issue, our solution is based on a central entity approach which takes in charge unmanaged contextual requirements and dynamically redeploys the policy when context changes are detected by this central entity. We also present an improvement over the OrBAC (Organization-Based Access Control) model. Up to now, a controller based on a contextual OrBAC policy is passive, in the sense that it assumes policy evaluation triggered by access requests. Therefore, it does not allow reasoning about policy state evolution when actions occur. The modi cations introduced by our work overcome this limitation and provide a proactive version of the model by integrating concepts from action speci cation languages

A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems have attracted the attention of researchers because of agents' automatic, pro-active, and dynamic problem solving behaviors. Consequently, there has been a rapid development in agent technology which has enabled us to provide or receive useful and convenient services in a variety of areas such as banking, transportation, e-business, and healthcare. In many of these services, it is, however, necessary that security is guaranteed. Unless we guarantee the security services based on agent-based systems, these services will face significant deployment problems. In this paper, we survey existing work related to security in multi-agent systems, especially focused on access control and trust/reputation, and then present our analyses. We also present existing problems and discuss future research challenges. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V 2011

Policy based roles for distributed systems security

Distributed systems are increasingly being used in commercial environments necessitating the development of trustworthy and reliable security mechanisms. There is often no clear informal or formal specification of enterprise authorisation policies and no tools to translate policy specifications to access control implementation mechanisms such as capabilities or Access Control Lists. It is thus difficult to analyse the policy to detect conflicts or flaws and it is difficult to verify that the implementation corresponds to the policy specification. We present in this paper a framework for the specification of management policies. We are concerned with two types of policies: obligations which specify what activities a manager or agent must or must not perform on a set of target objects and authorisations which specify what activities a subject (manager or agent) can or can not perform on the set of target objects. Management policies are then grouped into roles reflecting the organisation..

Activity Theory Guided Role Engineering

Roles are convenient and powerful concept for facilitating access to distributed systems and enforcing access management polices. RBAC is one the most widely used role engineering models in enterprises. Several threats arise due to insecure and inefficient design of roles when social and interaction dynamics in an organizational setting are ignored. Activity theory is one of the most applied and researched theories in context of understanding human actions, interactions with environments and dynamics against different social entities. The paper, first, presents overview of role-engineering and activity theory. Then the paper presents different methods in which activity theory can be applied for efficient and secure role-engineering processes. A case study, carried out at a US-based midsize financial institution, is also presented to demonstrate 1) how traditional role-engineering processes give way to threats and 2) how using activity theory models (2 used in this paper) can mitigate risks in role-engineering process

A Semantic Approach to Secure Collaborative Inter-Organizational eBusiness Processes (SSCIOBP)

The information supply chain (ISC) involves the exchange, organization, selection, and synthesis of relevant knowledge and information about production, purchase planning, demand forecasting, and inventory among collaborating business partners in a value chain. Information and knowledge sharing in an ISC occurs in a business process context. Seamless knowledge exchange within and across organizations involved in secure business processes is critically needed to secure and cultivate the information supply chain. Extant literature does not explicitly consider or systematically represent component knowledge, process knowledge and security knowledge for business processes within and across organizations. As a result, organizations engaged in collaborative inter-organizational processes continue to be plagued with issues such as semantic conflict issues, lack of integration of heterogeneous systems, and lack of security knowledge regarding authorized access to resources. Without appropriate security controls, manual interventions lead to unauthorized access to resources. These problems motivate our Semantic Approach to Secure Collaborative Inter-Organizational eBusiness Processes (SSCIOBP). We follow a design science paradigm to identify meta-requirements of SSCIOBP and develop the design artifact. SSCIOBP is evaluated using observational and descriptive evaluation methods following Hevner et al. (2004). We apply our approach to show how the Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) industry standard models can be enhanced using the proposed design artifact. We apply SSCIOBP to a case study to illustrate its applicability in mapping core business processes of organizations to solve semantic inter-operability issues and systematically incorporate component, process and security knowledge in the design of secure business processes across the information supply chain

Towards trusted volunteer grid environments

Intensive experiences show and confirm that grid environments can be considered as the most promising way to solve several kinds of problems relating either to cooperative work especially where involved collaborators are dispersed geographically or to some very greedy applications which require enough power of computing or/and storage. Such environments can be classified into two categories; first, dedicated grids where the federated computers are solely devoted to a specific work through its end. Second, Volunteer grids where federated computers are not completely devoted to a specific work but instead they can be randomly and intermittently used, at the same time, for any other purpose or they can be connected or disconnected at will by their owners without any prior notification. Each category of grids includes surely several advantages and disadvantages; nevertheless, we think that volunteer grids are very promising and more convenient especially to build a general multipurpose distributed scalable environment. Unfortunately, the big challenge of such environments is, however, security and trust. Indeed, owing to the fact that every federated computer in such an environment can randomly be used at the same time by several users or can be disconnected suddenly, several security problems will automatically arise. In this paper, we propose a novel solution based on identity federation, agent technology and the dynamic enforcement of access control policies that lead to the design and implementation of trusted volunteer grid environments.Comment: 9 Pages, IJCNC Journal 201

A Design Theory for Secure Semantic E-Business Processes (SSEBP)

This dissertation develops and evaluates a Design theory. We follow the design science approach (Hevener, et al., 2004) to answer the following research question: "How can we formulate a design theory to guide the analysis and design of Secure Semantic eBusiness processes (SSeBP)?" Goals of SSeBP design theory include (i) unambiguously represent information and knowledge resources involved in eBusiness processes to solve semantic conflicts and integrate heterogeneous information systems; (ii) analyze and model business processes that include access control mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access to resources; and (iii) facilitate the coordination of eBusiness process activities-resources by modeling their dependencies. Business processes modeling techniques such as Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) (BPMI, 2004) and UML Activity Diagrams (OMG, 2003) lack theoretical foundations and are difficult to verify for correctness and completeness (Soffer and Wand, 2007). Current literature on secure information systems design methods are theoretically underdeveloped and consider security as a non-functional requirement and as an afterthought (Siponen et al. 2006, Mouratidis et al., 2005). SSeBP design theory is one of the first attempts at providing theoretically grounded guidance to design richer secure eBusiness processes for secure and coordinated seamless knowledge exchange among business partners in a value chain. SSeBP design theory allows for the inclusion of non-repudiation mechanisms into the analysis and design of eBusiness processes which lays the foundations for auditing and compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. SSeBP design theory is evaluated through a rigorous multi-method evaluation approach including descriptive, observational, and experimental evaluation. First, SSeBP design theory is validated by modeling business processes of an industry standard named Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR) approach. Our model enhances CPFR by incorporating security requirements in the process model, which is critically lacking in the current CPFR technical guidelines. Secondly, we model the demand forecasting and capacity planning business processes for two large organizations to evaluate the efficacy and utility of SSeBP design theory to capture the realistic requirements and complex nuances of real inter-organizational business processes. Finally, we empirically evaluate SSeBP, against enhanced Use Cases (Siponen et al., 2006) and UML activity diagrams, for informational equivalence (Larkin and Simon, 1987) and its utility in generating situational awareness (Endsley, 1995) of the security and coordination requirements of a business process. Specific contributions of this dissertation are to develop a design theory (SSeBP) that presents a novel and holistic approach that contributes to the IS knowledge base by filling an existing research gap in the area of design of information systems to support secure and coordinated business processes. The proposed design theory provides practitioners with the meta-design and the design process, including the system components and principles to guide the analysis and design of secure eBusiness processes that are secure and coordinated