Security, Trust and Privacy (STP) Model for Federated Identity and Access Management (FIAM) Systems

The federated identity and access management systems facilitate the home domain organization users to access multiple resources (services) in the foreign domain organization by web single sign-on facility. In federated environment the user’s authentication is performed in the beginning of an authentication session and allowed to access multiple resources (services) until the current session is active. In current federated identity and access management systems the main security concerns are: (1) In home domain organization machine platforms bidirectional integrity measurement is not exist, (2) Integrated authentication (i.e., username/password and home domain machine platforms mutual attestation) is not present and (3) The resource (service) authorization in the foreign domain organization is not via the home domain machine platforms bidirectional attestation

Attestation in Trusted Computing: Challenges and Potential Solutions

This report examines the state of play in TCG attestation. It asks the question: how practical is the attestation specification and does it meet the needs of designs that propose to take advantage of trusted computing functionality? It is shown that, broadly speaking, both specification and implementation falls short of its stated goals. Application designs expect different semantics. Straightforward application of attestation to a running system does not provide adequate assurance nor does it scale. It is argued that extending the TCG architecture and reworking application designs are the most viable routes to making attestation a practical proposition

Augmenting Internet-based Card Not Present Transactions with Trusted Computing: An Analysis

In this paper, we demonstrate how the staged roll out of Trusted Computing technology, beginning with ubiquitous client-side Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), can be used to enhance the security of Internet-based Card Not Present (CNP) transactions. This approach can be seen as an alternative to the proposed mass deployment of unconnected card readers in the provision of CNP transaction authorisation. Using TPM functionality (and the new PC architecture that will evolve around it) we demonstrate how TPM-enabled platforms can integrate with SSL, 3-D Secure and server-side SET. We highlight how the use of TPM functionality, as is currently being deployed in the marketplace, is not a panacea for solving all the problems associated with CNP transactions. In this instance, a more holistic approach requiring additional Trusted Computing components incorporating Operating System, processor and chipset support is required to combat the threat of malware

Using trusted platform module for securing virtual environment access in cloud

With the increasing usage of Cloud and the Virtualization technology, there comes also an increasing demand to ensure the security levels of all computing environments and components associated and accordingly in this work we propose a new machine authentication mechanism using Trusted Platform Module that can be used to provide a secure access to virtual environments in the cloud. The proposed authentication module is aiming to contribute in providing a solution to Poor machine identity, Multi-tenancy as well as Malicious insiders known security problems in the cloud. It is targeting the access security to graphical user interface of virtual machines hosted on VirtualBox hypervisor in a Linux based environment through authenticating clients trying to connect using the client\u27s Trusted Platform Module Public Endorsement key as a pre-authorized signature to the virtual environment in addition to the normal user name and password authentication of the connecting user. Results obtained from the output of this work indicates that it is possible to authenticate the machines based on their Trusted Platform Module signatures and provide them access to VirtualBox environment only based on a pre-defined Access Control List with minimal one time overhead upon establishing the initial connection

Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security

Computer scienc

Trusted execution: applications and verification

Useful security properties arise from sealing data to specific units of code. Modern processors featuring Intel’s TXT and AMD’s SVM achieve this by a process of measured and trusted execution. Only code which has the correct measurement can access the data, and this code runs in an environment trusted from observation and interference. We discuss the history of attempts to provide security for hardware platforms, and review the literature in the field. We propose some applications which would benefit from use of trusted execution, and discuss functionality enabled by trusted execution. We present in more detail a novel variation on Diffie-Hellman key exchange which removes some reliance on random number generation. We present a modelling language with primitives for trusted execution, along with its semantics. We characterise an attacker who has access to all the capabilities of the hardware. In order to achieve automatic analysis of systems using trusted execution without attempting to search a potentially infinite state space, we define transformations that reduce the number of times the attacker needs to use trusted execution to a pre-determined bound. Given reasonable assumptions we prove the soundness of the transformation: no secrecy attacks are lost by applying it. We then describe using the StatVerif extensions to ProVerif to model the bounded invocations of trusted execution. We show the analysis of realistic systems, for which we provide case studies

Challenges of security and trust of mobile devices as digital avionics component

Mobile devices are becoming part of modern digital avionics. Mobile devices can be applied to a range of scenarios, from Electronic Flight Bags to maintenance platforms, in order to manage and configure flight information, configure avionics networks or perform maintenance tasks (including offloading flight logs). It can be argued that recent developments show an increased use of personal mobile devices playing an integral part in the digital avionics industry. In this paper, we look into different proposals for integrating mobile devices with various avionics networks -- either as part of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) or Corporate Owned Personally Enabled (COPE) paradigms. Furthermore, we will evaluate the security and trust challenges presented by these devices in their respective domains. This analysis will also include the issues related to communication between the mobile device and the aircraft network via either wired or wireless channels. Finally, the paper puts forward a set of guidelines with regards to the security and trust issues that might be crucial when enabling mobile devices to be part of aircraft networks.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Secure entity authentication

According to Wikipedia, authentication is the act of confirming the truth of an attribute of a single piece of a datum claimed true by an entity. Specifically, entity authentication is the process by which an agent in a distributed system gains confidence in the identity of a communicating partner (Bellare et al.). Legacy password authentication is still the most popular one, however, it suffers from many limitations, such as hacking through social engineering techniques, dictionary attack or database leak. To address the security concerns in legacy password-based authentication, many new authentication factors are introduced, such as PINs (Personal Identification Numbers) delivered through out-of-band channels, human biometrics and hardware tokens. However, each of these authentication factors has its own inherent weaknesses and security limitations. For example, phishing is still effective even when using out-of-band-channels to deliver PINs (Personal Identification Numbers). In this dissertation, three types of secure entity authentication schemes are developed to alleviate the weaknesses and limitations of existing authentication mechanisms: (1) End user authentication scheme based on Network Round-Trip Time (NRTT) to complement location based authentication mechanisms; (2) Apache Hadoop authentication mechanism based on Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology; and (3) Web server authentication mechanism for phishing detection with a new detection factor NRTT. In the first work, a new authentication factor based on NRTT is presented. Two research challenges (i.e., the secure measurement of NRTT and the network instabilities) are addressed to show that NRTT can be used to uniquely and securely identify login locations and hence can support location-based web authentication mechanisms. The experiments and analysis show that NRTT has superior usability, deploy-ability, security, and performance properties compared to the state-of-the-art web authentication factors. In the second work, departing from the Kerb eros-centric approach, an authentication framework for Hadoop that utilizes Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology is proposed. It is proven that pushing the security down to the hardware level in conjunction with software techniques provides better protection over software only solutions. The proposed approach provides significant security guarantees against insider threats, which manipulate the execution environment without the consent of legitimate clients. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance and the security properties of the proposed approach. Moreover, the correctness and the security guarantees are formally proved via Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic. In the third work, together with a phishing victim identification algorithm, NRTT is used as a new phishing detection feature to improve the detection accuracy of existing phishing detection approaches. The state-of-art phishing detection methods fall into two categories: heuristics and blacklist. The experiments show that the combination of NRTT with existing heuristics can improve the overall detection accuracy while maintaining a low false positive rate. In the future, to develop a more robust and efficient phishing detection scheme, it is paramount for phishing detection approaches to carefully select the features that strike the right balance between detection accuracy and robustness in the face of potential manipulations. In addition, leveraging Deep Learning (DL) algorithms to improve the performance of phishing detection schemes could be a viable alternative to traditional machine learning algorithms (e.g., SVM, LR), especially when handling complex and large scale datasets

Towards a Trustworthy Thin Terminal for Securing Enterprise Networks

Organizations have many employees that lack the technical knowledge to securely operate their machines. These users may open malicious email attachments/links or install unverified software such as P2P programs. These actions introduce significant risk to an organization\u27s network since they allow attackers to exploit the trust and access given to a client machine. However, system administrators currently lack the control of client machines needed to prevent these security risks. A possible solution to address this issue lies in attestation. With respect to computer science, attestation is the ability of a machine to prove its current state. This capability can be used by client machines to remotely attest to their state, which can be used by other machines in the network when making trust decisions. Previous research in this area has focused on the use of a static root of trust (RoT), requiring the use of a chain of trust over the entire software stack. We would argue this approach is limited in feasibility, because it requires an understanding and evaluation of the all the previous states of a machine. With the use of late launch, a dynamic root of trust introduced in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) v1.2 specification, the required chain of trust is drastically shortened, minimizing the previous states of a machine that must be evaluated. This reduced chain of trust may allow a dynamic RoT to address the limitations of a static RoT. We are implementing a client terminal service that utilizes late launch to attest to its execution. Further, the minimal functional requirements of the service facilitate strong software verification. The goal in designing this service is not to increase the security of the network, but rather to push the functionality, and therefore the security risks and responsibilities, of client machines to the network€™s servers. In doing so, we create a platform that can more easily be administered by those individuals best equipped to do so with the expectation that this will lead to better security practices. Through the use of late launch and remote attestation in our terminal service, the system administrators have a strong guarantee the clients connecting to their system are secure and can therefore focus their efforts on securing the server architecture. This effectively addresses our motivating problem as it forces user actions to occur under the control of system administrators