Infrastructure for collaborating data-researchers in a smart grid pilot

A large amount of stakeholders are often involved in Smart Grid projects. Each partner has its own way of storing, representing and accessing its data. An integrated data storage and a joint online analytical mining infrastructure is needed to limit the amount of duplicated work and to raise the overall security of the system. The proposed infrastructure is composed of standard application software and an in-house developed data analysis tool that allows researchers to add and share their own functionality without compromising security

Misconfiguration Analysis of Network Access Control Policies

Network access control (NAC) systems have a very important role in network security. However, NAC policy configuration is an extremely complicated and error-prone task due to the semantic complexity of NAC policies and the large number of rules that could exist. This significantly increases the possibility of policy misconfigurations and network vulnerabilities. NAC policy misconfigurations jeopardize network security and can result in a severe consequence such as reachability and denial of service problems. In this thesis, we choose to study and analyze the NAC policy configuration of two significant network security devices, namely, firewall and IDS/IPS. In the first part of the thesis, a visualization technique is proposed to visualize firewall rules and policies to efficiently enhance the understanding and inspection of firewall configuration. This is implemented in a tool called PolicyVis. Our tool helps the user to answer general questions such as ‘‘Does this policy satisfy my connection/security requirements’’. If not, the user can detect all misconfigurations in the firewall policy. In the second part of the thesis, we study various policy misconfigurations of Snort, a very popular IDS/IPS. We focus on the misconfigurations of the flowbits option which is one of the most important features to offers a stateful signature-based NIDS. We particularly concentrate on a class of flowbits misconfiguration that makes Snort susceptible to false negatives. We propose a method to detect the flowbits misconfiguration, suggest practical solutions with controllable false positives to fix the misconfiguration and formally prove that the solutions are complete and sound

Measuring and Mitigating Potential Risks of Third-party Resource Inclusions

In today's computer services, developers commonly use third-party resources like libraries, hosting infrastructure and advertisements. Using third-party components improves the efficiency and enhances the quality of developing custom applications. However, while using third-party resources adopts their benefits, it adopts their vulnerabilities, as well. Unfortunately, developers are uninformed about the risks, as a result of which, the services are susceptible to various attacks. There has been a lot of work on how to develop first-hand secure services. The key focus in my thesis is quantifying the risks in the inclusion of third-party resources and looking into possible ways of mitigating them. Based on the fundamental ways that risks arise, we broadly classify them into Direct and Indirect Risks. Direct risk is the risk that comes with invoking the third-party resource incorrectly—even if the third party is otherwise trustworthy whereas indirect risk is the risk that comes with the third-party resource potentially acting in an untrustworthy manner—even if it were invoked correctly. To understand the security related direct risks in third-party inclusions, we study cryptographic frameworks. Developers often use these frameworks incorrectly and introduce security vulnerabilities. This is because current cryptographic frameworks erode abstraction boundaries, as they do not encapsulate all the framework-specific knowledge and expect developers to understand security attacks and defenses. Starting from the documented misuse cases of cryptographic APIs, we infer five developer needs and we show that a good API design would address these needs only partially. Building on this observation, we propose APIs that are semantically meaningful for developers. We show how these interfaces can be implemented consistently on top of existing frameworks using novel and known design patterns, and we propose build management hooks for isolating security workarounds needed during the development and test phases. To understand the performance related direct risks in third-party inclusions, we study resource hints in webpage HTML. Today's websites involve loading a large number of resources, resulting in a considerable amount of time issuing DNS requests, requesting resources, and waiting for responses. As an optimization for these time sinks, websites may load resource hints, such as DNS prefetch, preconnect, preload, pre-render, and prefetch tags in their HTML files to cause clients to initiate DNS queries and resource fetches early in their web-page downloads before encountering the precise resource to download. We explore whether websites are making effective use of resource hints using techniques based on the tool we developed to obtain a complete snapshot of a webpage at a given point in time. We find that many popular websites are highly ineffective in their use of resource hints, causing clients to query and connect to extraneous domains, download unnecessary data, and may even use resource hints to bypass ad blockers. To evaluate the indirect risks, we study the web topology. Users who visit benign, popular websites are unfortunately bombarded with malicious popups, malware- loading sites, and phishing sites. The questions we want to address here are: Which domains are responsible for such malicious activity? At what point in the process of loading a popular, trusted website does the trust break down to loading dangerous content? To answer these questions, we first understand what third-party resources websites load (both directly and indirectly). I present a tool that constructs the most complete map of a website’s resource-level topology to date. This is surprisingly nontrivial; most prior work used only a single run of a single tool (e.g., Puppeteer or Selenium), but I show that this misses a significant fraction of resources. I then apply my tool to collect the resource topology graphs of 20,000 websites from the Alexa ranking, and analyze them to understand which third-party resource inclusions lead to malicious resources. I believe that these third-party inclusions are not always constant or blocked by existing Ad-blockers. We argue that greater accountability of these third parties can lead to a safer web

Proceedings of VikingPLoP 2013 Conference

This is the proceedings of VikingPLoP 2013 – a record of all papers workshopped during the conference. VikingPLoP is a Nordic conference of pattern languages of programs which took place this year in Horse Inn of Luomajärvi, Ikaalinen, Finland in March 2013. VikingPLoP was organized jointly by Tampere University of Technology and Hillside Europe. VikingPLoP 2013 was also sponsored by Wiley which provided books for the focus group reading session. The conference was organized in Finland for the second time in a row. Previous location in 2012 was in Saariselkä Lapland. In 2013 vikings were moving towards south and chose the Horse Inn in Ikaalinen as the venue as it offered a luxurious opportunity for participants to experience rustic romance, good food, horseback riding, traditional Finnish sauna, the nature, and wilderness tracks. In March the landscape was still covered in snow making the landscape ruggedly beautiful.The papers in this proceedings book are updated versions of the papers workshopped in the conference. In the beginning, participants submitted their papers for shepherding process. In the shepherding process, the shepherd, an experienced pattern writer, gave ideas and feedback for the author, colloquially known as a sheep. The sheep incorporated this feedback in to her paper. After three iterations of shepherding the paper was discussed at the conference in a writer's workshop. The workshop group gave comments, criticism and praise. After the conference the authors updated their papers according to the workshop feedback.This process of giving feedback was made possible by having a community of trust. Mutual trust was built by playing non-competitive games and by having social activities. VikingPLoP 2013 focused on patterns and their usage in various fields of expertise. These fields included a wide range of topics from educational patterns to safety patterns and embedded system's software architecture patterns. Bringing people together from various fields of expertise stimulates creativity and new ideas might emerge. These innovations are reflected in the papers in these proceedings. VikingPLoP 2013 was especially a conference for newcomers and over half of the participants were first time PLoP participants.These proceedings contain 9 papers. In addition, a book reading workshop was arranged with Bob Hanmer who presented his new title Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Dummies and discussed it with the participants using video conferencing tools

Security-Pattern Recognition and Validation

The increasing and diverse number of technologies that are connected to the Internet, such as distributed enterprise systems or small electronic devices like smartphones, brings the topic IT security to the foreground. We interact daily with these technologies and spend much trust on a well-established software development process. However, security vulnerabilities appear in software on all kinds of PC(-like) platforms, and more and more vulnerabilities are published, which compromise systems and their users. Thus, software has also to be modified due to changing requirements, bugs, and security flaws and software engineers must more and more face security issues during the software design; especially maintenance programmers must deal with such use cases after a software has been released. In the domain of software development, design patterns have been proposed as the best-known solutions for recurring problems in software design. Analogously, security patterns are best practices aiming at ensuring security. This thesis develops a deeper understanding of the nature of security patterns. It focuses on their validation and detection regarding the support of reviews and maintenance activities. The landscape of security patterns is diverse. Thus, published security patterns are collected and organized to identify software-related security patterns. The description of the selected software-security patterns is assessed, and they are compared against the common design patterns described by Gamma et al. to identify differences and issues that may influence the detection of security patterns. Based on these insights and a manual detection approach, we illustrate an automatic detection method for security patterns. The approach is implemented in a tool and evaluated in a case study with 25 real-world Android applications from Google Play

Deterministic ethernet in a safety critical environment

This thesis explores the concept of creating safety critical networks with low congestion and latency (known as critical networking) for real time critical communication (safety critical environment). Critical networking refers to the dynamic management of all the application demands in a network within all available network bandwidth, in order to avoid congestion. Critical networking removes traffic congestion and delay to provide quicker response times. A Deterministic Ethernet communication system in a Safety Critical environment addresses the disorderly Ethernet traffic condition inherent in all Ethernet networks. Safety Critical environment means both time critical (delay sensitive) and content critical (error free). Ethernet networks however do not operate in a deterministic fashion, giving rise to congestion. To discover the common traffic patterns that cause congestion a detailed analysis was carried out using neural network techniques. This analysis has investigated the issues associated with delay and congestion and identified their root cause, namely unknown transmission conditions. The congestion delay, and its removal, was explored in a simulated control environment in a small star network using the Air-field communication standard. A Deterministic Ethernet was created and implemented using a Network Traffic Oscillator (NTO). NTO uses Critical Networking principles to transform random burst application transmission impulses into deterministic sinusoid transmissions. It is proved that the NTO has the potential to remove congestion and minimise latency. Based on its potential, it is concluded that the proposed Deterministic Ethernet can be used to improve network security as well as control long haul communication