Formal analysis of security models for mobile devices, virtualization platforms and domain name systems

En esta tesis investigamos la seguridad de aplicaciones de seguridad criticas, es decir aplicaciones en las cuales una falla podria producir consecuencias inaceptables. Consideramos tres areas: dispositivos moviles, plataformas de virtualizacion y sistemas de nombres de dominio. La plataforma Java Micro Edition define el Perfil para Dispositivos de Informacion Moviles (MIDP) para facilitar el desarrollo de aplicaciones para dispositivos moviles, como telefonos celulares y asistentes digitales personales. En este trabajo primero estudiamos y comparamos formalmente diversas variantes del modelo de seguridad especificado por MIDP para acceder a recursos sensibles de un dispositivo movil. Los hipervisores permiten que multiples sistemas operativos se ejecuten en un hardware compartido y ofrecen un medio para establecer mejoras de seguridad y flexibilidad de sistemas de software. En esta tesis formalizamos un modelo de hipervisor y establecemos (formalmente) que el hipervisor asegura propiedades de aislamiento entre los diferentes sistemas operativos de la plataforma, y que las solicitudes de estos sistemas son atendidas siempre. Demostramos tambien que las plataformas virtualizadas son transparentes, es decir, que un sistema operativo no puede distinguir si ejecuta solo en la plataforma o si lo hace junto con otros sistemas operativos. Las Extensiones de Seguridad para el Sistema de Nombres de Dominio (DNSSEC) constituyen un conjunto de especificaciones que proporcionan servicios de aseguramiento de autenticacion e integridad de origen de datos DNS. Finalmente, presentamos una especificaci´on minimalista de un modelo de DNSSEC que proporciona los fundamentos necesarios para formalmente establecer y verificar propiedades de seguridad relacionadas con la cadena de confianza del arbol de DNSSEC. Desarrollamos todas nuestras formalizaciones en el C´alculo de Construccion

Formal Analysis of Security Models for Mobile Devices, Virtualization Platforms, and Domain Name Systems

In this work we investigate the security of security-critical applications, i.e. applications in which a failure may produce consequences that are unacceptable. We consider three areas: mobile devices, virtualization platforms, and domain name systems. The Java Micro Edition platform defines the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) to facilitate the development of applications for mobile devices, like cell phones and PDAs. We first study and compare formally several variants of the security model specified by MIDP to access sensitive resources of a mobile device. Hypervisors allow multiple guest operating systems to run on shared hardware, and offer a compelling means of improving the security and the flexibility of software systems. In this work we present a formalization of an idealized model of a hypervisor. We establish (formally) that the hypervisor ensures strong isolation properties between the different operating systems, and guarantees that requests from guest operating systems are eventually attended. We show also that virtualized platforms are transparent, i.e. a guest operating system cannot distinguish whether it executes alone or together with other guest operating systems on the platform. The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is a suite of specifications that provides origin authentication and integrity assurance services for DNS data. We finally introduce a minimalistic specification of a DNSSEC model which provides the grounds needed to formally state and verify security properties concerning the chain of trust of the DNSSEC tree. We develop all our formalizations in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions —formal language that combines a higher-order logic and a richly-typed functional programming language— using the Coq proof assistant

Preface to the December 2015 issue

We are glad to present the last issue of 2015, completing Volume 18 of the CLEI Electronic Journal. This issue is comprised by the following regular papers. The first paper, “Quality of Protection on WDM networks: A Recovery Probability based approach”, by M. D. Rodas-Brítez and D. P. Pinto-Roa, features a proposal of a new quality of protection (QoP) paradigm for Wavelength Division Multiplexing optical networks. The new approach is flexible, allowing the network administrator to define and select a set of protection levels, based on recovery probabilities which measure the degree of conflict among primary lightpaths sharing backup lightpaths. To show the interest of the approach, a Genetic Algorithm is used to design a routing strategy by multi-objective optimization, minimizing the number of blocked requests, the number of services without protection, the total differences between the requested QoP and the assigned QoP, and the network cost. The second paper, “Towards Scalability for Federated Identity Systems for Cloud-Based Environments”, by A.A. Pereira, J. B. M. Sobral and C. M. Westphall, addresses scalability issues in identity management for cloud computing environments. The authors propose an adapted sticky-session mechanism, as an alternative approach to the more common distributed memory approach, and discuss the implications in therms of computational resources, throughput and overall efficiency. The following work, “Formal Analysis of Security Models for Mobile Devices, Virtualization Platforms, and Domain Name Systems”, by G. Betarte and C. Luna, tackles security models for security-critical applications in three areas: mobile devices, virtualization platforms, and domain name systems. The authors develop formalizations using the Calculus of Inductive Constructions, to study different usual variants of security models in these platforms and their properties. The last paper of this issue is “Digi-Clima Grid: image processing and distributed computing for recovering historical climate data”, by authors S. Nesmachnow, G. Usera and F. Brasileiro. This paper reports an experience of implementing semi-automatic techniques for digitalizing and recovering historical climate records applying parallel computing techniques over distributed computing infrastructures, which was applied to Uruguayan historical climate data. As we complete now the eighteenth year of continued existence of CLEIej, we thank the regional community for its continued support, and we encourage researchers working in computer science and its applications to consider submitting their work to CLEIej, as the the leading electronic, open access journal in Computer Science in Latin America