Access Control for IoT: Problems and Solutions in the Smart Home

The Internet of Things (IoT) is receiving considerable amount of attention from both industry and academia due to the business models that it enables and the radical changes it introduced in the way people interact with technology. The widespread adaption of IoT in our everyday life generates new security and privacy challenges. In this thesis, we focus on "access control in IoT": one of the key security services that ensures the correct functioning of the entire IoT system. We highlight the key differences with access control in traditional systems (such as databases, operating systems, or web services) and describe a set of requirements that any access control system for IoT should fulfill. We demonstrate that the requirements are adaptable to a wide range of IoT use case scenarios by validating the requirements for access control elicited when analyzing the smart lock system as sample use case from smart home scenario. We also utilize the CAP theorem for reasoning about access control systems designed for the IoT. We introduce MQTT Security Assistant (MQTTSA), a tool that automatically detects misconfigurations in MQTT-based IoT deployments. To assist IoT system developers, MQTTSA produces a report outlining detected vulnerabilities, together with (high level) hints and code snippets to implement adequate mitigations. The effectiveness of the tool is assessed by a thorough experimental evaluation. Then, we propose a lazy approach to Access Control as a Service (ACaaS) that allows the specification and management of policies independently of the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) while leveraging its enforcement mechanisms. We demonstrate the approach by investigating (also experimentally) alternative deployments in the IoT platform offered by Amazon Web Services on a realistic smart lock solution

Towards Practical Access Control and Usage Control on the Cloud using Trusted Hardware

Cloud-based platforms have become the principle way to store, share, and synchronize files online. For individuals and organizations alike, cloud storage not only provides resource scalability and on-demand access at a low cost, but also eliminates the necessity of provisioning and maintaining complex hardware installations. Unfortunately, because cloud-based platforms are frequent victims of data breaches and unauthorized disclosures, data protection obliges both access control and usage control to manage user authorization and regulate future data use. Encryption can ensure data security against unauthorized parties, but complicates file sharing which now requires distributing keys to authorized users, and a mechanism that prevents revoked users from accessing or modifying sensitive content. Further, as user data is stored and processed on remote ma- chines, usage control in a distributed setting requires incorporating the local environmental context at policy evaluation, as well as tamper-proof and non-bypassable enforcement. Existing cryptographic solutions either require server-side coordination, offer limited flexibility in data sharing, or incur significant re-encryption overheads on user revocation. This combination of issues are ill-suited within large-scale distributed environments where there are a large number of users, dynamic changes in user membership and access privileges, and resources are shared across organizational domains. Thus, developing a robust security and privacy solution for the cloud requires: fine-grained access control to associate the largest set of users and resources with variable granularity, scalable administration costs when managing policies and access rights, and cross-domain policy enforcement. To address the above challenges, this dissertation proposes a practical security solution that relies solely on commodity trusted hardware to ensure confidentiality and integrity throughout the data lifecycle. The aim is to maintain complete user ownership against external hackers and malicious service providers, without losing the scalability or availability benefits of cloud storage. Furthermore, we develop a principled approach that is: (i) portable across storage platforms without requiring any server-side support or modifications, (ii) flexible in allowing users to selectively share their data using fine-grained access control, and (iii) performant by imposing modest overheads on standard user workloads. Essentially, our system must be client-side, provide end-to-end data protection and secure sharing, without significant degradation in performance or user experience. We introduce NeXUS, a privacy-preserving filesystem that enables cryptographic protection and secure file sharing on existing network-based storage services. NeXUS protects the confidentiality and integrity of file content, as well as file and directory names, while mitigating against rollback attacks of the filesystem hierarchy. We also introduce Joplin, a secure access control and usage control system that provides practical attribute-based sharing with decentralized policy administration, including efficient revocation, multi-domain policies, secure user delegation, and mandatory audit logging. Both systems leverage trusted hardware to prevent the leakage of sensitive material such as encryption keys and access control policies; they are completely client-side, easy to install and use, and can be readily deployed across remote storage platforms without requiring any server-side changes or trusted intermediary. We developed prototypes for NeXUS and Joplin, and evaluated their respective overheads in isolation and within a real-world environment. Results show that both prototypes introduce modest overheads on interactive workloads, and achieve portability across storage platforms, including Dropbox and AFS. Together, NeXUS and Joplin demonstrate that a client-side solution employing trusted hardware such as Intel SGX can effectively protect remotely stored data on existing file sharing services

D1.3 - SUPERCLOUD Architecture Implementation

In this document we describe the implementation of the SUPERCLOUD architecture. The architecture provides an abstraction layer on top of which SUPERCLOUD users can realize SUPERCLOUD services encompassing secure computation workloads, secure and privacy-preserving resilient data storage and secure networking resources spanning across different cloud service providers' computation, data storage and network resources. The components of the SUPERCLOUD architecture implementation are described. Integration between the different layers of the architecture (computing security, data protection, network security) and with the facilities for security self-management is also highlighted. Finally, we provide download and installation instructions for the released software components that can be downloaded from our common SUPERCLOUD code repository

Policy-driven Security Management for Gateway-Oriented Reconfigurable Ecosystems

abstract: With the increasing user demand for low latency, elastic provisioning of computing resources coupled with ubiquitous and on-demand access to real-time data, cloud computing has emerged as a popular computing paradigm to meet growing user demands. However, with the introduction and rising use of wear- able technology and evolving uses of smart-phones, the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has become a prevailing notion in the currently growing technology industry. Cisco Inc. has projected a data creation of approximately 403 Zetabytes (ZB) by 2018. The combination of bringing benign devices and connecting them to the web has resulted in exploding service and data aggregation requirements, thus requiring a new and innovative computing platform. This platform should have the capability to provide robust real-time data analytics and resource provisioning to clients, such as IoT users, on-demand. Such a computation model would need to function at the edge-of-the-network, forming a bridge between the large cloud data centers and the distributed connected devices. This research expands on the notion of bringing computational power to the edge- of-the-network, and then integrating it with the cloud computing paradigm whilst providing services to diverse IoT-based applications. This expansion is achieved through the establishment of a new computing model that serves as a platform for IoT-based devices to communicate with services in real-time. We name this paradigm as Gateway-Oriented Reconfigurable Ecosystem (GORE) computing. Finally, this thesis proposes and discusses the development of a policy management framework for accommodating our proposed computational paradigm. The policy framework is designed to serve both the hosted applications and the GORE paradigm by enabling them to function more efficiently. The goal of the framework is to ensure uninterrupted communication and service delivery between users and their applications.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201