A RISK BASED APPROACH FOR SELECTING SERVICES IN BUSINESS PROCESS EXECUTION

The vision of automated business processes within a service-oriented paradigm includes the flexible orchestration of IT services. Whenever alternative services are available for activities in an ITsupported business process, an automated decision is worth aspiring to. According to valueoriented management, this decision should be motivated economically and also requires taking account of risk. This paper presents a novel approach for assessing the risk of IT services, based on vulnerability information as can be obtained in the form of publicly available Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) data

End-to-end security in service-oriented architecture

A service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based application is composed of a number of distributed and loosely-coupled web services, which are orchestrated to accomplish a more complex functionality. Any of these web services is able to invoke other web services to offload part of its functionality. The main security challenge in SOA is that we cannot trust the participating web services in a service composition to behave as expected all the time. In addition, the chain of services involved in an end-to-end service invocation may not be visible to the clients. As a result, any violation of client’s policies could remain undetected. To address these challenges in SOA, we proposed the following contributions. First, we devised two composite trust schemes by using graph abstraction to quantitatively maintain the trust levels of different services. The composite trust values are based on feedbacks from the actual execution of services, and the structure of the SOA application. To maintain the dynamic trust, we designed the trust manager, which is a trusted-third party service. Second, we developed an end-to-end inter-service policy monitoring and enforcement framework (PME framework), which is able to dynamically inspect the interactions between services at runtime and react to the potentially malicious activities according to the client’s policies. Third, we designed an intra-service policy monitoring and enforcement framework based on taint analysis mechanism to monitor the information flow within services and prevent information disclosure incidents. Fourth, we proposed an adaptive and secure service composition engine (ASSC), which takes advantage of an efficient heuristic algorithm to generate optimal service compositions in SOA. The service compositions generated by ASSC maximize the trustworthiness of the selected services while meeting the predefined QoS constraints. Finally, we have extensively studied the correctness and performance of the proposed security measures based on a realistic SOA case study. All experimental studies validated the practicality and effectiveness of the presented solutions

The Transitivity of Trust Problem in the Interaction of Android Applications

Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may interact, restricting single applications may create a false sense of security for the end users while data may still leave the mobile phone through other applications. Instead, the information flow needs to be policed for the composite system of applications in a transparent and usable manner. In this paper, we propose to employ static analysis based on the software architecture and focused data flow analysis to scalably detect information flows between components. Specifically, we aim to reveal transitivity of trust problems in multi-component mobile platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with Android applications, although the generalization of the analysis to similar composition-based architectures, such as Service-oriented Architecture, can also be explored in the future

Quantitative Evaluation and Reevaluation of Security in Services

Services are software components or systems designed to support interoperable machine or application-oriented interaction over a network. The popularity of services grows because they are easily accessible, very flexible, provide reach functionality, and can constitute more complex services. During the service selection, the user considers not only functional requirements to a service but also security requirements. The user would like to be aware that security of the service satisfies security requirements before starting the exploitation of the service, i.e., before the service is granted to access assets of the user. Moreover, the user wants to be sure that security of the service satisfies security requirements during the exploitation which may last for a long period. Pursuing these two goals require security of the service to be evaluated before the exploitation and continuously reevaluated during the exploitation. This thesis aims at a framework consisting of several quantitative methods for evaluation and continuous reevaluation of security in services. The methods should help a user to select a service and to control the service security level during the exploitation. The thesis starts with the formal model for general quantitative security metrics and for risk that may be used for the evaluation of security in services. Next, we adjust the computation of security metrics with a refined model of an attacker. Then, the thesis proposes a general method for the evaluation of security of a complex service composed from several simple services using different security metrics. The method helps to select the most secure design of the complex service. In addition, the thesis describes an approach based on the Usage Control (UCON) model for continuous reevaluation of security in services. Finally, the thesis discusses several strategies for a cost-effective decision making in the UCON unde

A Security, Privacy and Trust Methodology for IIoT

The implements of IoT and industrial IoT (IIoT) are increasingly becoming the consensus with Industry 4.0. Relevant data-driven methodologies are typically concentrated on the scoring systems of CVE prioritization schemes, the scoring formulas of CVSS metrics, and other vulnerability impact factors. However, these prioritized lists such as the CWE/SANS Top 25 suffer from a critical weakness: they fail to consider empirical evidence of exploits. Considering the distinct properties and specific risks of SCADA systems in IIoT, this paper overcomes the inherent limitation of IIoT empirical research which is the sample size of exploits by collecting data manually. This study then developed an exploits factors-embedded regression model to statistically access the significant relationships between security, privacy, and trust-based vulnerability attributes. Through this data-driven empirical methodology, the study elucidated the interactions of security, privacy, and trust in IIoT with professional quantitative indicators, which would provide grounds for substantial further related work. In addition to the security privacy and trust regression analysis, this study further explores the impact of IoT and IIoT by difference-in-difference (DID) approach, applying bootstrap standard error with Kernel option and quantile DID test to evaluate the robustness of DID model. In general, the empirical results indicated that: 1) the CVSS score of vulnerability is irrelevant to the disclosure of exploits, but is positively correlated with CWEs by Density and CVE year, 2) among the exploits of SCADA-related authors, the more identical CWEs that exist in these exploits, the higher the CVSS score of the exploit CVE will be, and CVE year has a negative moderating effect within this relationship; 3) the CVSS scores of SCADA exploits have significantly decreased in comparison with non-SCADA after the promulgation of Industry 4.0

F3TM: flooding factor based trust management framework for secure data transmission in MANETs

Due to the absence of infrastructure support, secure data dissemination is a challenging task in scalable mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) environment. In most of the traditional routing techniques for MANETs, either security has not been taken into account or only one aspect of security concern has been addressed without optimizing the routing performance. This paper proposes Flooding Factor based Framework for Trust Management (F3TM) in MANETs. True flooding approach is utilized to identify attacker nodes based on the calculation of trust value. Route Discovery Algorithm is developed to discover an efficient and secure path for data forwarding using Experimental Grey Wolf algorithm for validating network nodes. Enhanced Multi-Swarm Optimization is used to optimize the identified delivery path. Simulations are carried out in ns2 to assess and compare the performance of F3TM with the state-of-the-art frameworks: CORMAN and PRIME considering the metrics including delay, packet delivery ration, overhead and throughput. The performance assessment attests the reliable security of F3TM compared to the state-of-the-art frameworks