Secure Hardware Enhanced MyProxy: A Ph.D. Thesis Proposal

In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman demonstrated how New Directions In Cryptography could enable secure information exchange between parties that do not share secrets. In order for public key cryptography to work in modern distributed environments, we need an infrastructure for finding and trusting other parties\u27 public keys (i.e., a PKI). A number of useful applications become possible with PKI. While the applications differ in how they use keys (e.g., S/MIME uses the key for message encryption and signing, while client-side SSL uses the key for authentication), all applications share one assumption: users have keypairs. In previous work, we examined the security aspects of some of the standard keystores and the their interaction with the OS. We concluded that desktops are not safe places to store private keys, and we demonstrated the permeability of keystores such as the default Microsoft keystore and the Mozilla keystore. In addition to being unsafe, these desktop keystores have the added disadvantage of being immobile. In other previous work, we examined trusted computing. In industry, a new trusted computing initiative has emerged: the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) (now renamed the Trusted Computing Group (TCG)). The goal of the TCG design is lower-assurance security that protects an entire desktop platform and is cheap enough to be commercially feasible. Last year, we built a trusted computing platform based on the TCG specifications and hardware. The picture painted by these previous projects suggests that common desktops are not secure enough for use as PKI clients, and trusted computing can improve the security of client machines. The question that I propose to investigate is: Can I build a system which applies trusted computing hardware in a reasonable manner in order to make desktops usable for PKI? My design begins with the Grid community\u27s MyProxy credential repository, and enhances it to take advantage of secure hardware on the clients, at the repository, and in the policy framework. The result is called Secure Hardware Enhanced MyProxy

Trust management for the World Wide Web

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-[63]).by Yang-hua Chu.M.Eng

How to wrap it up - A formally verified proposal for the use of authenticated wrapping in PKCS#11

Being the most widely used and comprehensive standard for hardware security modules, cryptographic tokens and smart cards, PKCS#11 has been the subject of academic study for years. PKCS#11 provides a key store that is separate from the application, so that, ideally, an application never sees a key in the clear. Again and again, researchers have pointed out the need for an import/export mechanism that ensures the integrity of the permissions associated to a key. With version 2.40, for the first time, the standard included authenticated deterministic encryption schemes. The interface to this operation is insecure, however, so that an application can get the key in the clear, subverting the purpose of using a hardware security module. This work proposes a formal model for the secure use of authenticated deterministic encryption in PKCS#11, including concrete API changes to allow for secure policies to be implemented. Owing to the authenticated encryption mechanism, the policy we propose provides more functionality than any policy proposed so far and can be implemented without access to a random number generator. Our results cover modes of operation that rely on unique initialisation vectors (IVs), like GCM or CCM, but also modes that generate synthetic IVs. We furthermore provide a proof for the deduction soundness of our modelling of deterministic encryption in Böhl et.al.'s composable deduction soundness framework

Practical privacy enhancing technologies for mobile systems

Mobile computers and handheld devices can be used today to connect to services available on the Internet. One of the predominant technologies in this respect for wireless Internet connection is the IEEE 802.11 family of WLAN standards. In many countries, WLAN access can be considered ubiquitous; there is a hotspot available almost anywhere. Unfortunately, the convenience provided by wireless Internet access has many privacy tradeoffs that are not obvious to mobile computer users. In this thesis, we investigate the lack of privacy of mobile computer users, and propose practical enhancements to increase the privacy of these users. We show how explicit information related to the users' identity leaks on all layers of the protocol stack. Even before an IP address is configured, the mobile computer may have already leaked their affiliation and other details to the local network as the WLAN interface openly broadcasts the networks that the user has visited. Free services that require authentication or provide personalization, such as online social networks, instant messengers, or web stores, all leak the user's identity. All this information, and much more, is available to a local passive observer using a mobile computer. In addition to a systematic analysis of privacy leaks, we have proposed four complementary privacy protection mechanisms. The main design guidelines for the mechanisms have been deployability and the introduction of minimal changes to user experience. More specifically, we mitigate privacy problems introduced by the standard WLAN access point discovery by designing a privacy-preserving access-point discovery protocol, show how a mobility management protocol can be used to protect privacy, and how leaks on all layers of the stack can be reduced by network location awareness and protocol stack virtualization. These practical technologies can be used in designing a privacy-preserving mobile system or can be retrofitted to current systems

Privacy in cloud computing

Tese de mestrado em Segurança Informática, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2010O paradigma cloud computing está progressivamente a integrar-se nas tecnologias de informação e é também visto por muitos como a próxima grande viragem na indústria da computação. A sua integração significa grandes alterações no modo como olhamos para a segurança dos dados de empresas que decidem confiar informação confidencial aos fornecedores de serviços cloud. Esta alteração implica um nível muito elevado de confiança no fornecedor do serviço. Ao mudar para a cloud, uma empresa relega para o fornecedor do serviço controlo sobre os seus dados, porque estes vão executar em hardware que é propriedade do fornecedor e sobre o qual a empresa não tem qualquer controlo. Este facto irá pesar muito na decisão, de mudar para a cloud, de empresas que tratam informação delicada (p.ex., informação médica ou financeira). Neste trabalho propomos demonstrar de que forma um administrador malicioso, com acesso ao hardware do fornecedor, consegue violar a privacidade dos dados que o utilizador da cloud confiou ao prestador desses serviços. Definimos como objectivo uma análise detalhada de estratégias de ataque que poderão ajudar um administrador malicioso a quebrar a privacidade de clientes da cloud, bem como a eficácia demonstrada contra esses mesmos ataques por mecanismos de protecção já propostos para a cloud. Pretendemos que este trabalho seja capaz de alertar a comunidade científica para a gravidade dos problemas de segurança que actualmente existem na cloud e, que ao mesmo tempo, sirva como motivação para uma acção célere desta, de forma a encontrar soluções para esses problemas.The paradigm of cloud computing is progressively integrating itself in the Information Technology industry and it is also seen by many experts as the next big shift in this industry. This integration implies considerable alterations in the security schemes used to ensure that the privacy of confidential information, companies entrust to the cloud provider, is kept. It also means that the level of trust in the cloud provider must be considerably high. When moving to the cloud, a company relinquishes control over its data to the cloud provider. This happens because, when operating in the cloud, the data is going to execute on top of the hardware owned by the cloud provider and, in this scenario, the client has no control over that hardware. Companies that deal with sensitive data (e.g., medical or financial records) have to weigh the importance of this problem when considering moving their data to the cloud. In this work, we provide a demonstration of how a malicious administrator, with access to the hardware of the cloud provider, is capable of violating the privacy of the data entrusted to the cloud provider by his clients. Our objective is to offer a detailed analysis of attack strategies that can be used by a malicious administrator to break the privacy of cloud clients, as well as the level of efficacy demonstrated by some protection mechanism that have already been proposed for the cloud. We also hope that this work is capable of capturing the attention of the research community to the security problems existent in the cloud and, that at the same time, it works as a motivation factor for a prompt action in order to find solutions for these problems

Emerging research directions in computer science : contributions from the young informatics faculty in Karlsruhe

In order to build better human-friendly human-computer interfaces, such interfaces need to be enabled with capabilities to perceive the user, his location, identity, activities and in particular his interaction with others and the machine. Only with these perception capabilities can smart systems ( for example human-friendly robots or smart environments) become posssible. In my research I\u27m thus focusing on the development of novel techniques for the visual perception of humans and their activities, in order to facilitate perceptive multimodal interfaces, humanoid robots and smart environments. My work includes research on person tracking, person identication, recognition of pointing gestures, estimation of head orientation and focus of attention, as well as audio-visual scene and activity analysis. Application areas are humanfriendly humanoid robots, smart environments, content-based image and video analysis, as well as safety- and security-related applications. This article gives a brief overview of my ongoing research activities in these areas

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Security in Mobile Multiagent Systems

This report contains the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Security on Security of Mobile Multiagent Systems (SEMAS2002). The Workshop was held in Montreal, Canada as a satellite event to the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents in 2001. The far reaching influence of the Internet has resulted in an increased interest in agent technologies, which are poised to play a key role in the implementation of successful Internet and WWW-based applications in the future. While there is still considerable hype concerning agent technologies, there is also an increasing awareness of the problems involved. In particular, that these applications will not be successful unless security issues can be adequately handled. Although there is a large body of work on cryptographic techniques that provide basic building-blocks to solve specific security problems, relatively little work has been done in investigating security in the multiagent system context. Related problems are secure communication between agents, implementation of trust models/authentication procedures or even reflections of agents on security mechanisms. The introduction of mobile software agents significantly increases the risks involved in Internet and WWW-based applications. For example, if we allow agents to enter our hosts or private networks, we must offer the agents a platform so that they can execute correctly but at the same time ensure that they will not have deleterious effects on our hosts or any other agents / processes in our network. If we send out mobile agents, we should also be able to provide guarantees about specific aspects of their behaviour, i.e., we are not only interested in whether the agents carry out-out their intended task correctly. They must defend themselves against attacks initiated by other agents, and survive in potentially malicious environments. Agent technologies can also be used to support network security. For example in the context of intrusion detection, intelligent guardian agents may be used to analyse the behaviour of agents on a firewall or intelligent monitoring agents can be used to analyse the behaviour of agents migrating through a network. Part of the inspiration for such multi-agent systems comes from primitive animal behaviour, such as that of guardian ants protecting their hill or from biological immune systems

Aspects of Modeling and Verifying Secure Procedures

Security protocols are specifications for exchanging messages on a possibly insecure network. They aim at achieving some security goals (eg authenticating the parties involved in a communication, or preserving confidentiality of certain messages) preventing some malicious party to achieve advantages for its own. Goals of security protocols are generally achieved through the use of cryptography, the art of writing in secret characters, not comprehensible to anyone but the sender and the intended recipient. There is however a branch, in the computer science community, that, among its wide field of activities, aims at studying possible attacks on secure procedures without breaking cryptography, eg by manipulating some of the exchanged messages. This is the formal methods community, with an eye for security. This thesis mainly investigates the formal modeling and analysis of security protocols, both with finite and non finite behaviour, both within a process-algebraic and an automata framework. Real life protocols for signing and protecting digital contents and for giving assurance about authentic correspondences will be specified by means of the above cited formalisms, and some of their properties will be verified by means of formal proofs and automated tools. The original contributions of this thesis are the following. Within the framework of a formal modeling and verification of security protocols, we have applied an automated tool to better understand some secure mechanisms for the delivery of electronic documents. This has given us a deep insight on revealing the effects of omitted (or even erroneously implemented) security checks. Furthermore, a formal framework for modeling and analysing secure multicast and wireless communication protocols has been proposed. The analysis is mostly based on some new compositional principles giving sufficient conditions for safely composing an arbitrary number of components within a unique system. Also, steps towards providing the Team Automata formalism (TA) with a framework for security analysis have been taken. Within the framework, we model and analyse integrity and privacy properties, contributing to testify the expressive power and modelling capabilities of TA