A Design of MAC Model Based on the Separation of Duties and Data Coloring: DSDC-MAC

Among the access control methods for database security, there is Mandatory Access Control (MAC) model in which the security level is set to both the subject and the object to enhance the security control. Legacy MAC models have focused only on one thing, either confidentiality or integrity. Thus, it can cause collisions between security policies in supporting confidentiality and integrity simultaneously. In addition, they do not provide a granular security class policy of subjects and objects in terms of subjects\u27 roles or tasks. In this paper, we present the security policy of Bell_LaPadula Model (BLP) model and Biba model as one complemented policy. In addition, Duties Separation and Data Coloring (DSDC)-MAC model applying new data coloring security method is proposed to enable granular access control from the viewpoint of Segregation of Duty (SoD). The case study demonstrated that the proposed modeling work maintains the practicality through the design of Human Resources management System. The proposed model in this study is suitable for organizations like military forces or intelligence agencies where confidential information should be carefully handled. Furthermore, this model is expected to protect systems against malicious insiders and improve the confidentiality and integrity of data

On Properties of Policy-Based Specifications

The advent of large-scale, complex computing systems has dramatically increased the difficulties of securing accesses to systems' resources. To ensure confidentiality and integrity, the exploitation of access control mechanisms has thus become a crucial issue in the design of modern computing systems. Among the different access control approaches proposed in the last decades, the policy-based one permits to capture, by resorting to the concept of attribute, all systems' security-relevant information and to be, at the same time, sufficiently flexible and expressive to represent the other approaches. In this paper, we move a step further to understand the effectiveness of policy-based specifications by studying how they permit to enforce traditional security properties. To support system designers in developing and maintaining policy-based specifications, we formalise also some relevant properties regarding the structure of policies. By means of a case study from the banking domain, we present real instances of such properties and outline an approach towards their automatised verification.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Design-Time Quantification of Integrity in Cyber-Physical-Systems

In a software system it is possible to quantify the amount of information that is leaked or corrupted by analysing the flows of information present in the source code. In a cyber-physical system, information flows are not only present at the digital level, but also at a physical level, and to and fro the two levels. In this work, we provide a methodology to formally analyse a Cyber-Physical System composite model (combining physics and control) using an information flow-theoretic approach. We use this approach to quantify the level of vulnerability of a system with respect to attackers with different capabilities. We illustrate our approach by means of a water distribution case study

Practical assessment of Biba integrity for TCG-enabled platforms

Checking the integrity of an application is necessary to determine if the latter will behave as expected. The method defined by the Trusted Computing Group consists in evaluating the fingerprints of the platform hardware and software components required for the proper functioning of the application to be assessed. However, this only ensures that a process was working correctly at load-time but not for its whole life-cycle. Policy-Reduced Integrity Measurement Architecture (PRIMA) addresses this problem by enforcing a security policy that denies information flows from potentially malicious processes to an application target of the evaluation and its dependencies (requirement introduced by CW-Lite, an evolution of the Biba integrity model). Given the difficulty of deploying PRIMA (as platform administrators have to tune their security policies to satisfy the CW-Lite requirements) we propose in this paper Enhanced IMA, an extended version of the Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) that, unlike PRIMA, works almost out of the box and just reports information flows instead of enforcing them. In addition, we introduce a model to evaluate the information reported by Enhanced IMA with existing technique

Combined Security and Schedulability Analysis for MILS Real-Time Critical Architectures

Real-time critical systems have to comply with stringent timing constraints, otherwise, disastrous consequences can occur at runtime. A large effort has been made to propose models and tools to verify timing constraints by schedulability analysis at the early stages of system designs. Fewer efforts have been made on verifying the security properties in these systems despite the fact that sinister consequences can also happen if these properties are compromised. In this article, we investigate how to jointly verify security and timing constraints. We show how to model a security architecture (MILS) and how to verify both timing constraints and security properties. Schedulability is investigated by the mean of scheduling analysis methods implemented into the Cheddar scheduling analyzer. Experiments are conducted to show the impact that improving security has on the schedulability analysis

A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications

A smart grid is a new form of electricity network with high fidelity power-flow control, self-healing, and energy reliability and energy security using digital communications and control technology. To upgrade an existing power grid into a smart grid, it requires significant dependence on intelligent and secure communication infrastructures. It requires security frameworks for distributed communications, pervasive computing and sensing technologies in smart grid. However, as many of the communication technologies currently recommended to use by a smart grid is vulnerable in cyber security, it could lead to unreliable system operations, causing unnecessary expenditure, even consequential disaster to both utilities and consumers. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security requirements and the possible vulnerabilities in smart grid communications and survey the current solutions on cyber security for smart grid communications. © 2012 IEEE