Notes On The Design Of An Internet Adversary

The design of the defenses Internet systems can deploy against attack, especially adaptive and resilient defenses, must start from a realistic model of the threat. This requires an assessment of the capabilities of the adversary. The design typically evolves through a process of simulating both the system and the adversary. This requires the design and implementation of a simulated adversary based on the capability assessment. Consensus on the capabilities of a suitable adversary is not evident. Part of the recent redesign of the protocol used by peers in the LOCKSS digital preservation system included a conservative assessment of the adversary's capabilities. We present our assessment and the implications we drew from it as a step towards a reusable adversary specification

A Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains

Due to their interesting features, blockchains have become popular in recent years. They are full-stack systems where security is a critical factor for their success. The main focus of this work is to systematize knowledge about security and privacy issues of blockchains. To this end, we propose a security reference architecture based on models that demonstrate the stacked hierarchy of various threats (similar to the ISO/OSI hierarchy) as well as threat-risk assessment using ISO/IEC 15408. In contrast to the previous surveys, we focus on the categorization of security incidents based on their origins and using the proposed architecture we present existing prevention and mitigation techniques. The scope of our work mainly covers aspects related to the decentralized nature of blockchains, while we mention common operational security issues and countermeasures only tangentially

The Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains: Towards a Standardized Model for Studying Vulnerabilities, Threats, and Defenses

Blockchains are distributed systems, in which security is a critical factor for their success. However, despite their increasing popularity and adoption, there is a lack of standardized models that study blockchain-related security threats. To fill this gap, the main focus of our work is to systematize and extend the knowledge about the security and privacy aspects of blockchains and contribute to the standardization of this domain. We propose the security reference architecture (SRA) for blockchains, which adopts a stacked model (similar to the ISO/OSI) describing the nature and hierarchy of various security and privacy aspects. The SRA contains four layers: (1) the network layer, (2) the consensus layer, (3) the replicated state machine layer, and (4) the application layer. At each of these layers, we identify known security threats, their origin, and countermeasures, while we also analyze several cross-layer dependencies. Next, to enable better reasoning about security aspects of blockchains by the practitioners, we propose a blockchain-specific version of the threat-risk assessment standard ISO/IEC 15408 by embedding the stacked model into this standard. Finally, we provide designers of blockchain platforms and applications with a design methodology following the model of SRA and its hierarchy

Notes On The Design Of An Internet Adversary

The design of the defenses Internet systems can deploy against attack, especially adaptive and resilient defenses, must start from a realistic model of the threat. This requires an assessment of the capabilities of the adversary. The design typically evolves through a process of simulating both the system and the adversary. This requires the design and implementation of a simulated adversary based on the capability assessment. Consensu