Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Organisational and cross-organisational identity management

We are all familiar with the overwhelming number of usernames and passwords needed in our daily life in the networked world. Services need to identify their end users and keep record on them. Traditionally, this has been done by providing the end user with an extra username and password for each new service. Managing all these isolated user identities is painful for the end user and work-intensive for the service owner. Having out-of-date user accounts and privileges is also a security threat for an organisation. Identity management refers to the process of representing and recognising entities as digital identities in computer networks. In an organisation, an end user s identity has a lifecycle. An identity is created when the user enters the organisation; for example, a new employee is hired, a student is admitted in a school or a company gets a new customer. Changes in the end user s affiliation to the organisation are reflected to his identity, and when the end user departs, his identity needs to be revoked. Organisational identity management develops and maintains an architecture that supports maintenance of user identities during their life cycle. In crossorganisational identity management, these identities are used also when accessing services that are outside the organisation. This thesis studies identity management in organisational and cross-organisational services. An organisation s motivations for improving identity management are presented. Attention is paid to how the person registries in an organisation should be interconnected to introduce an aggregated view on an end user s identity. Connection between identity management and introduction of more reliable authentication methods is shown. The author suggests what needs to be taken into account in a usable deployment of single sign-on and PKI for authentication. Federated identity management is a new way to implement end user identity management in services that cross organisational boundaries. This thesis studies how to establish a federation, an association of organisations that wants to exchange information about their users and services to enable cross-organisational collaborations and transactions. The author presents guidelines for organising a federation and preserving an end user s privacy in it. Finally, common use scenarios for federated identity management are presented

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Identity management policy and unlinkability: a comparative case study of the US and Germany

This study compares the privacy policies of Germany and the US in the field of identity management. It analyses the emergence of unlinkability within the countries’ electronic citizen identity initiatives. The study used qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interview and document analysis, to analyse the policy-making processes surrounding the issue of unlinkability. The study found that unlinkability is emerging in different ways in each country. Germany’s data protection and privacy regimes are more coherent than the US, and unlinkability was an incremental policy change. US unlinkability policies are a more significant departure from its data protection and policy regimes. New institutionalism is used to help explain the similarities and differences between the two countries’ policies. Scholars have long been calling for the use of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) in policy-making, and unlinkability falls into this category. By employing PETs in this way, German and US identity management policies are in the vanguard of their respective privacy regimes. Through these policies, the US comes closer to German and European data protection policies, doing so non-legislatively. The digital citizen identities appearing in both countries must be construed as commercial products inasmuch as official identities. Lack of attendance to the commercial properties of these identities frustrates policy goals. As national governments embark on further identity management initiatives, commercial and design imperatives, such as value to the citizen and usability, must be considered for policy to be successful

Trusted digital identity provision: GOV.UK Verify’s federated approach

The UK’s recently launched GOV.UK Verify service relies on a novel federated approach for digital identity verification. Accredited private companies are tasked with verifying the identities of individuals to enable them to access various government services and portals. The private identity providers can draw on a number of public and private databases to validate users’ identities to a given level of identity assurance. The paper provides an overview of the GOV.UK Verify approach to identity verification. It describes the government’s motivations for developing such a system; the standards, principles, and governance arrangements that underpin it; and how the identity proofing and verification works in practice. It considers the expansion of the Verify model for other government and private sector uses and discusses the exclusion, privacy, and liability risks associated with the use of the system. Finally, the paper highlights important lessons for other countries seeking to develop similar systems for digital access

Identity management policy and unlinkability: a comparative case study of the US and Germany

This study compares the privacy policies of Germany and the US in the field of identity management. It analyses the emergence of unlinkability within the countries’ electronic citizen identity initiatives. The study used qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interview and document analysis, to analyse the policy-making processes surrounding the issue of unlinkability. The study found that unlinkability is emerging in different ways in each country. Germany’s data protection and privacy regimes are more coherent than the US, and unlinkability was an incremental policy change. US unlinkability policies are a more significant departure from its data protection and policy regimes. New institutionalism is used to help explain the similarities and differences between the two countries’ policies. Scholars have long been calling for the use of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) in policy-making, and unlinkability falls into this category. By employing PETs in this way, German and US identity management policies are in the vanguard of their respective privacy regimes. Through these policies, the US comes closer to German and European data protection policies, doing so non-legislatively. The digital citizen identities appearing in both countries must be construed as commercial products inasmuch as official identities. Lack of attendance to the commercial properties of these identities frustrates policy goals. As national governments embark on further identity management initiatives, commercial and design imperatives, such as value to the citizen and usability, must be considered for policy to be successful

Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape

Cybersecurity and Privacy issues are becoming an important barrier for a trusted and dependable global digital society development. Cyber-criminals are continuously shifting their cyber-attacks specially against cyber-physical systems and IoT, since they present additional vulnerabilities due to their constrained capabilities, their unattended nature and the usage of potential untrustworthiness components. Likewise, identity-theft, fraud, personal data leakages, and other related cyber-crimes are continuously evolving, causing important damages and privacy problems for European citizens in both virtual and physical scenarios. In this context, new holistic approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools are needed to cope with those issues, and mitigate cyberattacks, by employing novel cyber-situational awareness frameworks, risk analysis and modeling, threat intelligent systems, cyber-threat information sharing methods, advanced big-data analysis techniques as well as exploiting the benefits from latest technologies such as SDN/NFV and Cloud systems. In addition, novel privacy-preserving techniques, and crypto-privacy mechanisms, identity and eID management systems, trust services, and recommendations are needed to protect citizens’ privacy while keeping usability levels. The European Commission is addressing the challenge through different means, including the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program, thereby financing innovative projects that can cope with the increasing cyberthreat landscape. This book introduces several cybersecurity and privacy research challenges and how they are being addressed in the scope of 15 European research projects. Each chapter is dedicated to a different funded European Research project, which aims to cope with digital security and privacy aspects, risks, threats and cybersecurity issues from a different perspective. Each chapter includes the project’s overviews and objectives, the particular challenges they are covering, research achievements on security and privacy, as well as the techniques, outcomes, and evaluations accomplished in the scope of the EU project. The book is the result of a collaborative effort among relative ongoing European Research projects in the field of privacy and security as well as related cybersecurity fields, and it is intended to explain how these projects meet the main cybersecurity and privacy challenges faced in Europe. Namely, the EU projects analyzed in the book are: ANASTACIA, SAINT, YAKSHA, FORTIKA, CYBECO, SISSDEN, CIPSEC, CS-AWARE. RED-Alert, Truessec.eu. ARIES, LIGHTest, CREDENTIAL, FutureTrust, LEPS. Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape is ideal for personnel in computer/communication industries as well as academic staff and master/research students in computer science and communications networks interested in learning about cyber-security and privacy aspects

Privacy-aware Security Applications in the Era of Internet of Things

In this dissertation, we introduce several novel privacy-aware security applications. We split these contributions into three main categories: First, to strengthen the current authentication mechanisms, we designed two novel privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication mechanisms, Continuous Authentication (CA) and Multi-factor Authentication (MFA). Our first system is Wearable-assisted Continuous Authentication (WACA), where we used the sensor data collected from a wrist-worn device to authenticate users continuously. Then, we improved WACA by integrating a noise-tolerant template matching technique called NTT-Sec to make it privacy-aware as the collected data can be sensitive. We also designed a novel, lightweight, Privacy-aware Continuous Authentication (PACA) protocol. PACA is easily applicable to other biometric authentication mechanisms when feature vectors are represented as fixed-length real-valued vectors. In addition to CA, we also introduced a privacy-aware multi-factor authentication method, called PINTA. In PINTA, we used fuzzy hashing and homomorphic encryption mechanisms to protect the users\u27 sensitive profiles while providing privacy-preserving authentication. For the second privacy-aware contribution, we designed a multi-stage privacy attack to smart home users using the wireless network traffic generated during the communication of the devices. The attack works even on the encrypted data as it is only using the metadata of the network traffic. Moreover, we also designed a novel solution based on the generation of spoofed traffic. Finally, we introduced two privacy-aware secure data exchange mechanisms, which allow sharing the data between multiple parties (e.g., companies, hospitals) while preserving the privacy of the individual in the dataset. These mechanisms were realized with the combination of Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) and Differential Privacy (DP) techniques. In addition, we designed a policy language, called Curie Policy Language (CPL), to handle the conflicting relationships among parties. The novel methods, attacks, and countermeasures in this dissertation were verified with theoretical analysis and extensive experiments with real devices and users. We believe that the research in this dissertation has far-reaching implications on privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication methods, smart home user privacy research, as well as the privacy-aware and secure data exchange methods

Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape

Cybersecurity and Privacy issues are becoming an important barrier for a trusted and dependable global digital society development. Cyber-criminals are continuously shifting their cyber-attacks specially against cyber-physical systems and IoT, since they present additional vulnerabilities due to their constrained capabilities, their unattended nature and the usage of potential untrustworthiness components. Likewise, identity-theft, fraud, personal data leakages, and other related cyber-crimes are continuously evolving, causing important damages and privacy problems for European citizens in both virtual and physical scenarios. In this context, new holistic approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools are needed to cope with those issues, and mitigate cyberattacks, by employing novel cyber-situational awareness frameworks, risk analysis and modeling, threat intelligent systems, cyber-threat information sharing methods, advanced big-data analysis techniques as well as exploiting the benefits from latest technologies such as SDN/NFV and Cloud systems. In addition, novel privacy-preserving techniques, and crypto-privacy mechanisms, identity and eID management systems, trust services, and recommendations are needed to protect citizens’ privacy while keeping usability levels. The European Commission is addressing the challenge through different means, including the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program, thereby financing innovative projects that can cope with the increasing cyberthreat landscape. This book introduces several cybersecurity and privacy research challenges and how they are being addressed in the scope of 15 European research projects. Each chapter is dedicated to a different funded European Research project, which aims to cope with digital security and privacy aspects, risks, threats and cybersecurity issues from a different perspective. Each chapter includes the project’s overviews and objectives, the particular challenges they are covering, research achievements on security and privacy, as well as the techniques, outcomes, and evaluations accomplished in the scope of the EU project. The book is the result of a collaborative effort among relative ongoing European Research projects in the field of privacy and security as well as related cybersecurity fields, and it is intended to explain how these projects meet the main cybersecurity and privacy challenges faced in Europe. Namely, the EU projects analyzed in the book are: ANASTACIA, SAINT, YAKSHA, FORTIKA, CYBECO, SISSDEN, CIPSEC, CS-AWARE. RED-Alert, Truessec.eu. ARIES, LIGHTest, CREDENTIAL, FutureTrust, LEPS. Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape is ideal for personnel in computer/communication industries as well as academic staff and master/research students in computer science and communications networks interested in learning about cyber-security and privacy aspects

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security