Names, addresses and identities in ambient networks

Ambient Networks interconnect independent realms that may use different local network technologies and may belong to different administrative or legal entities. At the core of these advanced internetworking concepts is a flexible naming architecture based on dynamic indirections between names, addresses and identities. This paper gives an overview of the connectivity abstractions of Ambient Networks and then describes its naming architecture in detail, comparing and contrasting them to other related next-generation network architectures

Ambient networks: Bridging heterogeneous network domains

Providing end-to-end communication in heterogeneous internetworking environments is a challenge. Two fundamental problems are bridging between different internetworking technologies and hiding of network complexity and differences from both applications and application developers. This paper presents abstraction and naming mechanisms that address these challenges in the Ambient Networks project. Connectivity abstractions hide the differences of heterogeneous internetworking technologies and enable applications to operate across them. A common naming framework enables end-to-end communication across otherwise independent internetworks and supports advanced networking capabilities, such as indirection or delegation, through dynamic bindings between named entities

Keys in the Clouds: Auditable Multi-device Access to Cryptographic Credentials

Personal cryptographic keys are the foundation of many secure services, but storing these keys securely is a challenge, especially if they are used from multiple devices. Storing keys in a centralized location, like an Internet-accessible server, raises serious security concerns (e.g. server compromise). Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a well-known solution for protecting sensitive data in untrusted environments, and are now becoming available on commodity server platforms. Although the idea of protecting keys using a server-side TEE is straight-forward, in this paper we validate this approach and show that it enables new desirable functionality. We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a TEE-based Cloud Key Store (CKS), an online service for securely generating, storing, and using personal cryptographic keys. Using remote attestation, users receive strong assurance about the behaviour of the CKS, and can authenticate themselves using passwords while avoiding typical risks of password-based authentication like password theft or phishing. In addition, this design allows users to i) define policy-based access controls for keys; ii) delegate keys to other CKS users for a specified time and/or a limited number of uses; and iii) audit all key usages via a secure audit log. We have implemented a proof of concept CKS using Intel SGX and integrated this into GnuPG on Linux and OpenKeychain on Android. Our CKS implementation performs approximately 6,000 signature operations per second on a single desktop PC. The latency is in the same order of magnitude as using locally-stored keys, and 20x faster than smart cards.Comment: Extended version of a paper to appear in the 3rd Workshop on Security, Privacy, and Identity Management in the Cloud (SECPID) 201

My Private Cloud Overview: A Trust, Privacy and Security Infrastructure for the Cloud

Based on the assumption that cloud providers can be trusted (to a certain extent) we define a trust, security and privacy preserving infrastructure that relies on trusted cloud providers to operate properly. Working in tandem with legal agreements, our open source software supports: trust and reputation management, sticky policies with fine grained access controls, privacy preserving delegation of authority, federated identity management, different levels of assurance and configurable audit trails. Armed with these tools, cloud service providers are then able to offer a reliable privacy preserving infrastructure-as-a-service to their clients