Formal analysis of confidentiality conditions related to data leakage

The size of the financial risk, the social repercussions and the legal ramifications resulting from data leakage are of great concern. Some experts believe that poor system designs are to blame. The goal of this thesis is to use applied formal methods to verify that data leakage related confidentiality properties of system designs are satisfied. This thesis presents a practically applicable approach for using Banks's confidentiality framework, instantiated using the Circus notation. The thesis proposes a tool-chain for mechanizing the application of the framework and includes a custom tool and the Isabelle theorem prover that coordinate to verify a given system model. The practical applicability of the mechanization was evaluated by analysing a number of hand-crafted systems having literature related confidentiality requirements. Without any reliable tool for using BCF or any Circus tool that can be extended for the same purpose, it was necessary to build a custom tool. Further, a lack of literature related descriptive case studies on confidentiality in systems compelled us to use hand-written system specifications with literature related confidentiality requirements. The results of this study show that the tool-chain proposed in this thesis is practically applicable in terms of time required. Further, the efficiency of the proposed tool-chain has been shown by comparing the time taken for analysing a system both using the mechanised approach as well as the manual approach

Proceedings of Monterey Workshop 2001 Engineering Automation for Sofware Intensive System Integration

The 2001 Monterey Workshop on Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. It is our pleasure to thank the workshop advisory and sponsors for their vision of a principled engineering solution for software and for their many-year tireless effort in supporting a series of workshops to bring everyone together.This workshop is the 8 in a series of International workshops. The workshop was held in Monterey Beach Hotel, Monterey, California during June 18-22, 2001. The general theme of the workshop has been to present and discuss research works that aims at increasing the practical impact of formal methods for software and systems engineering. The particular focus of this workshop was "Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration". Previous workshops have been focused on issues including, "Real-time & Concurrent Systems", "Software Merging and Slicing", "Software Evolution", "Software Architecture", "Requirements Targeting Software" and "Modeling Software System Structures in a fastly moving scenario".Office of Naval ResearchAir Force Office of Scientific Research Army Research OfficeDefense Advanced Research Projects AgencyApproved for public release, distribution unlimite

A development and assurance process for Medical Application Platform apps

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Computing and Information SciencesJohn M. HatcliffMedical devices have traditionally been designed, built, and certified for use as monolithic units. A new vision of "Medical Application Platforms" (MAPs) is emerging that would enable compositional medical systems to be instantiated at the point of care from a collection of trusted components. This work details efforts to create a development environment for applications that run on these MAPs. The first contribution of this effort is a language and code generator that can be used to model and implement MAP applications. The language is a subset of the Architecture, Analysis and Design Language (AADL) that has been tailored to the platform-based environment of MAPs. Accompanying the language is software tooling that provides automated code generation targeting an existing MAP implementation. The second contribution is a new hazard analysis process called the Systematic Analysis of Faults and Errors (SAFE). SAFE is a modified version of the previously-existing System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), that has been made more rigorous, partially compositional, and easier. SAFE is not a replacement for STPA, however, rather it more effectively analyzes the hardware- and software-based elements of a full safety-critical system. SAFE has both manual and tool-assisted formats; the latter consists of AADL annotations that are designed to be used with the language subset from the first contribution. An automated report generator has also been implemented to accelerate the hazard analysis process. Third, this work examines how, independent of its place in the system hierarchy or the precise configuration of its environment, a component may contribute to the safety (or lack thereof) of an entire system. Based on this, we propose a reference model which generalizes notions of harm and the role of components in their environment so that they can be applied to components either in isolation or as part of a complete system. Connections between these formalisms and existing approaches for system composition and fault propagation are also established. This dissertation presents these contributions along with a review of relevant literature, evaluation of the SAFE process, and concludes with discussion of potential future work

Management: A continuing bibliography with indexes

This biliography lists 919 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in 1981

Resilience-Building Technologies: State of Knowledge -- ReSIST NoE Deliverable D12

This document is the first product of work package WP2, "Resilience-building and -scaling technologies", in the programme of jointly executed research (JER) of the ReSIST Network of Excellenc

Cyberspace, Blockchain, Governance:How Technology Implies Normative Power and Regulation

Technologies and their inherent design choices create normative structures that affect governance. This chapter aims to illustrate how blockchain technology in particular introduces new norms into a legal framework. We first analyze the different forms of governance by distinguishing between old and new governance. With a view to code that functions as legal norms, Blockchain technology is particularly suited to create governance structures and mechanisms. However, one needs to be aware of the norms that are implicitly introduced into the legal system by a specific blockchain technology. We look at the blockchain technology that underlies cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. This blockchain introduces a decentralized, transparent, cryptographically locked and thus immutable shared ledger. In summary, these design choices have normative powers over the user and over user interaction. If this is indeed the case, then regulators have to actively assess newly introduced digital ledger technology and other technologies for their effect on the normative and legal system.</p

Automated Analysis of Scenario-Based Specifications of Distributed Access Control Policies with Non-mechanizable Activities

The advance of web services technologies promises to have far-reaching effects on the Internet and enterprise networks allowing for greater accessibility of data. The security challenges presented by the web services approach are formidable. In particular, access control solutions should be revised to address new challenges, such as the need of using certificates for the identification of users and their attributes, human intervention in the creation or selection of the certificates, and (chains of) certificates for trust management. With all these features, it is not surprising that analyzing policies to guarantee that a sensitive resource can be accessed only by authorized users becomes very difficult. In this paper, we present an automated technique to analyze scenario-based specifications of access control policies in open and distributed systems. We illustrate our ideas on a case study arising in the e-government area