194,148 research outputs found
Policy based runtime verification of information flow.
Standard security mechanism such as Access control, Firewall and Encryption only focus on controlling the release of information but no limitations are placed on controlling the propagation of that confidential information. The principle problem of controlling sensitive information confidentiality starts after access is granted. The research described in this thesis belongs to the constructive research field where the constructive refers to knowledge contributions being developed as a new framework, theory, model or algorithm. The methodology of the proposed approach is made up of eight work packages. One addresses the research background and the research project requirements. Six are scientific research work packages. The last work package concentrates on the thesis writing up. There is currently no monitoring mechanism for controlling information flow during runtime that support behaviour configurability and User interaction. Configurability is an important requirement because what is considered to be secure today can be insecure tomorrow. The interaction with users is very important in flexible and reliable security monitoring mechanism because different users may have different security requirements. The interaction with monitoring mechanism enables the user to change program behaviours or modify the way that information flows while the program is executing. One of the motivations for this research is the information flow policy in the hand of the end user. The main objective of this research is to develop a usable security mechanism for controlling information flow within a software application during runtime. Usable security refers to enabling users to manage their systems security without defining elaborate security rules before starting the application. Our aim is to provide usable security that enables users to manage their systems' security without defining elaborate security rules before starting the application. Security will be achieved by an interactive process in which our framework will query the user for security requirements for specific pieces of information that are made available to the software and then continue to enforce these requirements on the application using a novel runtime verification technique for tracing information flow. The main achievement of this research is a usable security mechanism for controlling information flow within a software application during runtime. Security will be achieved by an interactive process to enforce user requirements on the application using runtime verification technique for tracing information flow. The contributions are as following. Runtime Monitoring: The proposed runtime monitoring mechanism ensures that the program execution is contains only legal flows that are defined in the information flow policy or approved by the user. Runtime Management: The behaviour of a program that about to leak confidential information will be altered by the monitor according to the user decision. User interaction control: The achieved user interaction with the monitoring mechanism during runtime enable users to change the program behaviours while the program is executing.Libyan Embass
Non-interference for deterministic interactive programs
We consider the problem of defining an appropriate notion of non-interference (NI) for deterministic interactive programs. Previous work on the security of interactive programs by O'Neill, Clarkson and Chong (CSFW 2006) builds on earlier ideas due to Wittbold and Johnson (Symposium on Security and Privacy 1990), and argues for a notion of NI defined in terms of strategies modelling the behaviour of users. We show that, for deterministic interactive programs, it is not necessary to consider strategies and that a simple stream model of the users' behaviour is sufficient. The key technical result is that, for deterministic programs, stream-based NI implies the apparently more general strategy-based NI (in fact we consider a wider class of strategies than those of O'Neill et al). We give our results in terms of a simple notion of Input-Output Labelled Transition System, thus allowing application of the results to a large class of deterministic interactive programming languages
Sonification of Network Traffic Flow for Monitoring and Situational Awareness
Maintaining situational awareness of what is happening within a network is
challenging, not least because the behaviour happens within computers and
communications networks, but also because data traffic speeds and volumes are
beyond human ability to process. Visualisation is widely used to present
information about the dynamics of network traffic dynamics. Although it
provides operators with an overall view and specific information about
particular traffic or attacks on the network, it often fails to represent the
events in an understandable way. Visualisations require visual attention and so
are not well suited to continuous monitoring scenarios in which network
administrators must carry out other tasks. Situational awareness is critical
and essential for decision-making in the domain of computer network monitoring
where it is vital to be able to identify and recognize network environment
behaviours.Here we present SoNSTAR (Sonification of Networks for SiTuational
AwaReness), a real-time sonification system to be used in the monitoring of
computer networks to support the situational awareness of network
administrators. SoNSTAR provides an auditory representation of all the TCP/IP
protocol traffic within a network based on the different traffic flows between
between network hosts. SoNSTAR raises situational awareness levels for computer
network defence by allowing operators to achieve better understanding and
performance while imposing less workload compared to visual techniques. SoNSTAR
identifies the features of network traffic flows by inspecting the status flags
of TCP/IP packet headers and mapping traffic events to recorded sounds to
generate a soundscape representing the real-time status of the network traffic
environment. Listening to the soundscape allows the administrator to recognise
anomalous behaviour quickly and without having to continuously watch a computer
screen.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures plus supplemental material in Github repositor
Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments
The field of shared virtual environments, which also
encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a
system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model
Checking Interaction-Based Declassification Policies for Android Using Symbolic Execution
Mobile apps can access a wide variety of secure information, such as contacts
and location. However, current mobile platforms include only coarse access
control mechanisms to protect such data. In this paper, we introduce
interaction-based declassification policies, in which the user's interactions
with the app constrain the release of sensitive information. Our policies are
defined extensionally, so as to be independent of the app's implementation,
based on sequences of security-relevant events that occur in app runs. Policies
use LTL formulae to precisely specify which secret inputs, read at which times,
may be released. We formalize a semantic security condition, interaction-based
noninterference, to define our policies precisely. Finally, we describe a
prototype tool that uses symbolic execution to check interaction-based
declassification policies for Android, and we show that it enforces policies
correctly on a set of apps.Comment: This research was supported in part by NSF grants CNS-1064997 and
1421373, AFOSR grants FA9550-12-1-0334 and FA9550-14-1-0334, a partnership
between UMIACS and the Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences, and the
National Security Agenc
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