US Sanctions: No conflict, no Nordstream threat – An opportunity for greater EU-US cooperation. CEPS Policy Insights No 2017-31/August 2017

The new US sanctions law – Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act 2017 – is not a legal monster threatening European interests. It stems from specific and legitimate concerns on Capitol Hill about the threat to the integrity of US democratic institutions flowing from cyberattacks by the Russian Federation and the behaviour of the current President. The law’s most substantial legislative footprint merely codifies into law the Obama-era executive orders already agreed with the European Union. On a more positive note, the sanctions law provides opportunities for the US and the EU to cooperate to protect the West’s dem

Network-aware Active Wardens in IPv6

Every day the world grows more and more dependent on digital communication. Technologies like e-mail or the World Wide Web that not so long ago were considered experimental, have first become accepted and then indispensable tools of everyday life. New communication technologies built on top of the existing ones continuously race to provide newer and better functionality. Even established communication media like books, radio, or television have become digital in an effort to avoid extinction. In this torrent of digital communication a constant struggle takes place. On one hand, people, organizations, companies and countries attempt to control the ongoing communications and subject them to their policies and laws. On the other hand, there oftentimes is a need to ensure and protect the anonymity and privacy of the very same communications. Neither side in this struggle is necessarily noble or malicious. We can easily imagine that in presence of oppressive censorship two parties might have a legitimate reason to communicate covertly. And at the same time, the use of digital communications for business, military, and also criminal purposes gives equally compelling reasons for monitoring them thoroughly. Covert channels are communication mechanisms that were never intended nor designed to carry information. As such, they are often able to act ``below\u27\u27 the notice of mechanisms designed to enforce security policies. Therefore, using covert channels it might be possible to establish a covert communication that escapes notice of the enforcement mechanism in place. Any covert channel present in digital communications offers a possibility of achieving a secret, and therefore unmonitored, communication. There have been numerous studies investigating possibilities of hiding information in digital images, audio streams, videos, etc. We turn our attention to the covert channels that exist in the digital networks themselves, that is in the digital communication protocols. Currently, one of the most ubiquitous protocols in deployment is the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). Its universal presence and range make it an ideal candidate for covert channel investigation. However, IPv4 is approaching the end of its dominance as its address space nears exhaustion. This imminent exhaustion of IPv4 address space will soon force a mass migration towards Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) expressly designed as its successor. While the protocol itself is already over a decade old, its adoption is still in its infancy. The low acceptance of IPv6 results in an insufficient understanding of its security properties. We investigated the protocols forming the foundation of the next generation Internet, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMPv6) and found numerous covert channels. In order to properly assess their capabilities and performance, we built cctool, a comprehensive covert channel tool. Finally, we considered countermeasures capable of defeating discovered covert channels. For this purpose we extended the previously existing notions of active wardens to equip them with the knowledge of the surrounding network and allow them to more effectively fulfill their role

Model-driven Information Flow Security for Component-Based Systems

International audienceThis paper proposes a formal framework for studying information flow security in component-based systems. The security policy is defined and verified from the early steps of the system design. Two kinds of non-interference properties are formally introduced and for both of them, sufficient conditions that ensures and simplifies the automated verification are proposed. The verification is compositional, first locally, by checking the behavior of every atomic component and then globally, by checking the inter-components communication and coordination. The potential benefits are illustrated on a concrete case study about constructing secure heterogeneous distributed systems

Principles of Security and Trust

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Principles of Security and Trust, POST 2019, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2019, held as part of the European Joint Conference on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. They deal with theoretical and foundational aspects of security and trust, including on new theoretical results, practical applications of existing foundational ideas, and innovative approaches stimulated by pressing practical problems

Building Covert Timing Channel of the IoT-'Enabled MTS Based on Multi-Stage Verification

Although the global shipping industry is experiencing a productivity revolution due to the adoption of IoTs (Internet of Things), the dependence on complex data transmission and interactive centers is also increasing, which makes the IoT-enabled Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS) one of the most valuable but vulnerable industries against network security attacks. To guarantee the transmission security of confidential data, an important alternative in an untrustworthy IoT-enabled MTS is to apply the covert timing channels. This paper mainly introduces the construction of covert timing channel with low bit shifting rate and high reliability by multi-stage verification and error correction. For the covert timing channel schemes realized by active packet loss, the packet loss noise interferes with the channel's reliability. However, due to the constraints of stealthiness, the active packet loss ratio during covert communication is low, so more effective reliable strategies are needed to reduce noise interference. In the excellent scenario, when the bit error rate is lower than 0.08%, the transmission performance is kept at 0.49 bps. In the good scenario with strong network noise, although this method loses some performance, it can still maintain the transmission performance of 0.2 bps under the condition of bit error rate less than 1%, which effectively proves the effectiveness of multi-stage verification and error correction

“Their Need Was Great”: Émigrés and Anglo-American Intelligence Operations in the Early Cold War

Covert action during the Cold War has been the subject of much historiography. This research, however, is based for the most part on primary sources, specifically on the records declassified in the United States in 2007 as a consequence of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. The majority of the historiography on this topic either predates or neglects these records. The study of covert operations inside the Iron Curtain during the early Cold War, sponsored by Western states using émigré agents, usually ends with the conclusion that these operations were a failure, both in operational terms and from the point of view of the intelligence gathered. I will challenge this conclusion, showing that not only the operations gathered a significant amount of intelligence, but also that the intelligence obtained was considered valuable by policymakers and had an impact in the planning and policymaking strategies of the early Cold War. The focus on primary sources also allowed a detailed description of the practical aspects of the operations, leading to a more coherent and solid analysis of their development and consequences. This study focuses on American operations, due to the abundance of records available. British operations have also been considered and assessed in the best way the author found possible. Two case studies have been selected, based on the nationality of the émigré agents used: White Russians and Ukrainians. The intelligence outcome from these operations has been carefully analysed, and their influence on policymaking assessed in the wider context of the Cold War. The conclusion is a complete re-evaluation of the importance and value of Western Human intelligence in the late 1940s and 1950s

Pragmatics and Prosody

Most of the papers collected in this book resulted from presentations and discussions undertaken during the V Lablita Workshop that took place at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on August 23-25, 2011. The workshop was held in conjunction with the II Brazilian Seminar on Pragmatics and Prosody. The guiding themes for the joint event were illocution, modality, attitude, information patterning and speech annotation. Thus, all papers presented here are concerned with theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of speech. Among the papers in this volume, there are different theoretical orientations, which are mirrored through the methodological designs of studies pursued. However, all papers are based on the analysis of actual speech, be it from corpora or from experimental contexts trying to emulate natural speech. Prosody is the keyword that comes out from all the papers in this publication, which indicates the high standing of this category in relation to studies that are geared towards the understanding of major elements that are constitutive of the structuring of speech

Security and Privacy for Modern Wireless Communication Systems

The aim of this reprint focuses on the latest protocol research, software/hardware development and implementation, and system architecture design in addressing emerging security and privacy issues for modern wireless communication networks. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following: deep-learning-based security and privacy design; covert communications; information-theoretical foundations for advanced security and privacy techniques; lightweight cryptography for power constrained networks; physical layer key generation; prototypes and testbeds for security and privacy solutions; encryption and decryption algorithm for low-latency constrained networks; security protocols for modern wireless communication networks; network intrusion detection; physical layer design with security consideration; anonymity in data transmission; vulnerabilities in security and privacy in modern wireless communication networks; challenges of security and privacy in node–edge–cloud computation; security and privacy design for low-power wide-area IoT networks; security and privacy design for vehicle networks; security and privacy design for underwater communications networks