Model the System from Adversary Viewpoint: Threats Identification and Modeling

Security attacks are hard to understand, often expressed with unfriendly and limited details, making it difficult for security experts and for security analysts to create intelligible security specifications. For instance, to explain Why (attack objective), What (i.e., system assets, goals, etc.), and How (attack method), adversary achieved his attack goals. We introduce in this paper a security attack meta-model for our SysML-Sec framework, developed to improve the threat identification and modeling through the explicit representation of security concerns with knowledge representation techniques. Our proposed meta-model enables the specification of these concerns through ontological concepts which define the semantics of the security artifacts and introduced using SysML-Sec diagrams. This meta-model also enables representing the relationships that tie several such concepts together. This representation is then used for reasoning about the knowledge introduced by system designers as well as security experts through the graphical environment of the SysML-Sec framework.Comment: In Proceedings AIDP 2014, arXiv:1410.322

A Preliminary Study: Challenges in Capturing Security Requirements and Consistency Checking by Requirement Engineers

There has been a growing concern on the importance of security with the rise of phenomena, such as ecommerce and nomadic and geographically distributed work. Realizing the security early, especially in the requirement analysis phase, is important so that security problems can be tackled early enough before going further in the development process and avoid re-work. Ensuring the consistency of elicited functional security requirement of requirements specification is also crucial as the requirements should be well understood and agreed upon by all the stakeholders and end-users. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to further discuss on the challenges faced by Requirement Engineers (REs) in: (1) capturing Security Requirement and (2) Consistency Checking in Requirement Engineering. Motivated from the need to ensure consistency in functional security requirement for developing secure software and the gaps found in the existing works, a survey has been conducted involving 38 experts in software engineering in the industry. The survey aims to identify the current problems faced by them during the elicitation process, security standards used as the reference, elicitation and validation method, and the important properties considered while developing secure software. Results of the survey show that REs face difficulties to understand the security needs and the existing standards are difficult to understand. Therefore, it is proposed that an automated tool to elicit security requirements should be developed

A roadmap of problem frames research

It has been a decade since Michael Jackson introduced problem frames to the software engineering community. Since then, he has published further work addressing problem frames as well as presenting several keynote addresses. Other authors have researched problem frames, have written about their experiences and have expressed their opinions. It was not until 2004 that an opportunity presented itself for researchers in the field to gather as a community. The first International Workshop on Advances and Applications of Problem Frames (IWAAPF'04) was held at the International Conference on Software Engineering in Edinburgh on 24th May 2004. This event attracted over 30 participants: Jackson delivered a keynote address, researchers presented their work and an expert panel discussed the challenges of problem frames. Featuring in this special issue are two extended papers from the workshop, an invited contribution from Jackson in which he positions problem frames in the context of the software engineering discipline, and this article, where we provide a review of the literature

The right to democratic entitlement: Time for change?

The right to democratic entitlement is well documented in international law. Numerous universal and regional constitutional treaties are premised on it and reverend it. National constitutions of most States espouse themselves to it. International civil society champions it. It is a right that resides at the core of the United Nations' originating vision for a secure and peaceful world - steered on the twin rails of social justice and respect for human rights. The current Zimbabwe crisis that came to a head at the 2002 Presidential election suggests that mere institutionalisation of this right under international law, regional law and national constitutional laws is not in itself sufficient to ensure its enjoyment. For this right to pass from enchanting rhetoric to practice that promotes and upholds the dignity of human beings everywhere in the world, procedural and other accounting strategies need to be developed so that impunity for its breach is stopped. This article examines the possibilities of enjoyment of this right in transitional States under present international arrangements. It concludes that for this to happen the international community needs urgently to demonstrate its commitment to the enjoyment of this right through (1) consistent application of interventionist mechanisms such as the SHIRBRIG initiative in situations where the right is at issue and, (2) development of efficient international, regional and national election audit systems with power effectively to strike down elections that breach the said right

Computational Resource Abuse in Web Applications

Internet browsers include Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to support Web applications that require complex functionality, e.g., to let end users watch videos, make phone calls, and play video games. Meanwhile, many Web applications employ the browser APIs to rely on the user's hardware to execute intensive computation, access the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), use persistent storage, and establish network connections. However, providing access to the system's computational resources, i.e., processing, storage, and networking, through the browser creates an opportunity for attackers to abuse resources. Principally, the problem occurs when an attacker compromises a Web site and includes malicious code to abuse its visitor's computational resources. For example, an attacker can abuse the user's system networking capabilities to perform a Denial of Service (DoS) attack against third parties. What is more, computational resource abuse has not received widespread attention from the Web security community because most of the current specifications are focused on content and session properties such as isolation, confidentiality, and integrity. Our primary goal is to study computational resource abuse and to advance the state of the art by providing a general attacker model, multiple case studies, a thorough analysis of available security mechanisms, and a new detection mechanism. To this end, we implemented and evaluated three scenarios where attackers use multiple browser APIs to abuse networking, local storage, and computation. Further, depending on the scenario, an attacker can use browsers to perform Denial of Service against third-party Web sites, create a network of browsers to store and distribute arbitrary data, or use browsers to establish anonymous connections similarly to The Onion Router (Tor). Our analysis also includes a real-life resource abuse case found in the wild, i.e., CryptoJacking, where thousands of Web sites forced their visitors to perform crypto-currency mining without their consent. In the general case, attacks presented in this thesis share the attacker model and two key characteristics: 1) the browser's end user remains oblivious to the attack, and 2) an attacker has to invest little resources in comparison to the resources he obtains. In addition to the attack's analysis, we present how existing, and upcoming, security enforcement mechanisms from Web security can hinder an attacker and their drawbacks. Moreover, we propose a novel detection approach based on browser API usage patterns. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy of our detection model, after training it with the real-life crypto-mining scenario, through a large scale analysis of the most popular Web sites

Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements

Solutions and Tools for Secure Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Secure communication is considered a vital requirement in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Such a requirement embraces different aspects, including confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of exchanged information, proper management of security material, and effective prevention and reaction against security threats and attacks. However, WSNs are mainly composed of resource-constrained devices. That is, network nodes feature reduced capabilities, especially in terms of memory storage, computing power, transmission rate, and energy availability. As a consequence, assuring secure communication in WSNs results to be more difficult than in other kinds of network. In fact, trading effectiveness of adopted solutions with their efficiency becomes far more important. In addition, specific device classes or technologies may require to design ad hoc security solutions. Also, it is necessary to efficiently manage security material, and dynamically cope with changes of security requirements. Finally, security threats and countermeasures have to be carefully considered since from the network design phase. This Ph.D. dissertion considers secure communication in WSNs, and provides the following contributions. First, we provide a performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 security services. Then, we focus on the ZigBee technology and its security services, and propose possible solutions to some deficiencies and inefficiencies. Second, we present HISS, a highly scalable and efficient key management scheme, able to contrast collusion attacks while displaying a graceful degradation of performance. Third, we present STaR, a software component for WSNs that secures multiple traffic flows at the same time. It is transparent to the application, and provides runtime reconfigurability, thus coping with dynamic changes of security requirements. Finally, we describe ASF, our attack simulation framework for WSNs. Such a tool helps network designers to quantitatively evaluate effects of security attacks, produce an attack ranking based on their severity, and thus select the most appropriate countermeasures

Modeling security and privacy requirements: A use case-driven approach

Context: Modern internet-based services, ranging from food-delivery to home-caring, leverage the availability of multiple programmable devices to provide handy services tailored to end-user needs. These services are delivered through an ecosystem of device-specific software components and interfaces (e.g., mobile and wearable device applications). Since they often handle private information (e.g., location and health status), their security and privacy requirements are of crucial importance. Defining and analyzing those requirements is a significant challenge due to the multiple types of software components and devices integrated into software ecosystems. Each software component presents peculiarities that often depend on the context and the devices the component interact with, and that must be considered when dealing with security and privacy requirements. Objective: In this paper, we propose, apply, and assess a modeling method that supports the specification of security and privacy requirements in a structured and analyzable form. Our motivation is that, in many contexts, use cases are common practice for the elicitation of functional requirements and should also be adapted for describing security requirements. Method: We integrate an existing approach for modeling security and privacy requirements in terms of security threats, their mitigations, and their relations to use cases in a misuse case diagram. We introduce new security-related templates, i.e., a mitigation template and a misuse case template for specifying mitigation schemes and misuse case specifications in a structured and analyzable manner. Natural language processing can then be used to automatically report inconsistencies among artifacts and between the templates and specifications. Results: We successfully applied our approach to an industrial healthcare project and report lessons learned and results from structured interviews with engineers. Conclusion: Since our approach supports the precise specification and analysis of security threats, threat scenarios and their mitigations, it also supports decision making and the analysis of compliance to standards