5,534 research outputs found
Transparent code authentication at the processor level
The authors present a lightweight authentication mechanism that verifies the authenticity of code and thereby addresses the virus and malicious code problems at the hardware level eliminating the need for trusted extensions in the operating system. The technique proposed tightly integrates the authentication mechanism into the processor core. The authentication latency is hidden behind the memory access latency, thereby allowing seamless on-the-fly authentication of instructions. In addition, the proposed authentication method supports seamless encryption of code (and static data). Consequently, while providing the software users with assurance for authenticity of programs executing on their hardware, the proposed technique also protects the software manufacturers’ intellectual property through encryption. The performance analysis shows that, under mild assumptions, the presented technique introduces negligible overhead for even moderate cache sizes
Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"
According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient.
The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself.
Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners.
• The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another.
• The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion.
The behaviour of the entities may vary over time.
• The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment.
For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered.
The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems.
This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative.
We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration
A Program Logic for Verifying Secure Routing Protocols
The Internet, as it stands today, is highly vulnerable to attacks. However,
little has been done to understand and verify the formal security guarantees of
proposed secure inter-domain routing protocols, such as Secure BGP (S-BGP). In
this paper, we develop a sound program logic for SANDLog-a declarative
specification language for secure routing protocols for verifying properties of
these protocols. We prove invariant properties of SANDLog programs that run in
an adversarial environment. As a step towards automated verification, we
implement a verification condition generator (VCGen) to automatically extract
proof obligations. VCGen is integrated into a compiler for SANDLog that can
generate executable protocol implementations; and thus, both verification and
empirical evaluation of secure routing protocols can be carried out in this
unified framework. To validate our framework, we encoded several proposed
secure routing mechanisms in SANDLog, verified variants of path authenticity
properties by manually discharging the generated verification conditions in
Coq, and generated executable code based on SANDLog specification and ran the
code in simulation
Actor-network procedures: Modeling multi-factor authentication, device pairing, social interactions
As computation spreads from computers to networks of computers, and migrates
into cyberspace, it ceases to be globally programmable, but it remains
programmable indirectly: network computations cannot be controlled, but they
can be steered by local constraints on network nodes. The tasks of
"programming" global behaviors through local constraints belong to the area of
security. The "program particles" that assure that a system of local
interactions leads towards some desired global goals are called security
protocols. As computation spreads beyond cyberspace, into physical and social
spaces, new security tasks and problems arise. As networks are extended by
physical sensors and controllers, including the humans, and interlaced with
social networks, the engineering concepts and techniques of computer security
blend with the social processes of security. These new connectors for
computational and social software require a new "discipline of programming" of
global behaviors through local constraints. Since the new discipline seems to
be emerging from a combination of established models of security protocols with
older methods of procedural programming, we use the name procedures for these
new connectors, that generalize protocols. In the present paper we propose
actor-networks as a formal model of computation in heterogenous networks of
computers, humans and their devices; and we introduce Procedure Derivation
Logic (PDL) as a framework for reasoning about security in actor-networks. On
the way, we survey the guiding ideas of Protocol Derivation Logic (also PDL)
that evolved through our work in security in last 10 years. Both formalisms are
geared towards graphic reasoning and tool support. We illustrate their workings
by analysing a popular form of two-factor authentication, and a multi-channel
device pairing procedure, devised for this occasion.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables; journal submission; extended
references, added discussio
A Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks
This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy
efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in
Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which
witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks.
The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the
propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group
while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of
frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the
wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the
inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing
plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and
secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years,
various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These
protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page
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