19,672 research outputs found
Policy Enforcement with Proactive Libraries
Software libraries implement APIs that deliver reusable functionalities. To
correctly use these functionalities, software applications must satisfy certain
correctness policies, for instance policies about the order some API methods
can be invoked and about the values that can be used for the parameters. If
these policies are violated, applications may produce misbehaviors and failures
at runtime. Although this problem is general, applications that incorrectly use
API methods are more frequent in certain contexts. For instance, Android
provides a rich and rapidly evolving set of APIs that might be used incorrectly
by app developers who often implement and publish faulty apps in the
marketplaces. To mitigate this problem, we introduce the novel notion of
proactive library, which augments classic libraries with the capability of
proactively detecting and healing misuses at run- time. Proactive libraries
blend libraries with multiple proactive modules that collect data, check the
correctness policies of the libraries, and heal executions as soon as the
violation of a correctness policy is detected. The proactive modules can be
activated or deactivated at runtime by the users and can be implemented without
requiring any change to the original library and any knowledge about the
applications that may use the library. We evaluated proactive libraries in the
context of the Android ecosystem. Results show that proactive libraries can
automati- cally overcome several problems related to bad resource usage at the
cost of a small overhead.Comment: O. Riganelli, D. Micucci and L. Mariani, "Policy Enforcement with
Proactive Libraries" 2017 IEEE/ACM 12th International Symposium on Software
Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS), Buenos Aires,
Argentina, 2017, pp. 182-19
Verifying Policy Enforcers
Policy enforcers are sophisticated runtime components that can prevent
failures by enforcing the correct behavior of the software. While a single
enforcer can be easily designed focusing only on the behavior of the
application that must be monitored, the effect of multiple enforcers that
enforce different policies might be hard to predict. So far, mechanisms to
resolve interferences between enforcers have been based on priority mechanisms
and heuristics. Although these methods provide a mechanism to take decisions
when multiple enforcers try to affect the execution at a same time, they do not
guarantee the lack of interference on the global behavior of the system. In
this paper we present a verification strategy that can be exploited to discover
interferences between sets of enforcers and thus safely identify a-priori the
enforcers that can co-exist at run-time. In our evaluation, we experimented our
verification method with several policy enforcers for Android and discovered
some incompatibilities.Comment: Oliviero Riganelli, Daniela Micucci, Leonardo Mariani, and Yli\`es
Falcone. Verifying Policy Enforcers. Proceedings of 17th International
Conference on Runtime Verification (RV), 2017. (to appear
The Queen's Guard: A Secure Enforcement of Fine-grained Access Control In Distributed Data Analytics Platforms
Distributed data analytics platforms (i.e., Apache Spark, Hadoop) provide
high-level APIs to programmatically write analytics tasks that are run
distributedly in multiple computing nodes. The design of these frameworks was
primarily motivated by performance and usability. Thus, the security takes a
back seat. Consequently, they do not inherently support fine-grained access
control or offer any plugin mechanism to enable it, making them risky to be
used in multi-tier organizational settings.
There have been attempts to build "add-on" solutions to enable fine-grained
access control for distributed data analytics platforms. In this paper, first,
we show that straightforward enforcement of ``add-on'' access control is
insecure under adversarial code execution. Specifically, we show that an
attacker can abuse platform-provided APIs to evade access controls without
leaving any traces. Second, we designed a two-layered (i.e., proactive and
reactive) defense system to protect against API abuses. On submission of a user
code, our proactive security layer statically screens it to find potential
attack signatures prior to its execution. The reactive security layer employs
code instrumentation-based runtime checks and sandboxed execution to throttle
any exploits at runtime. Next, we propose a new fine-grained access control
framework with an enhanced policy language that supports map and filter
primitives. Finally, we build a system named SecureDL with our new access
control framework and defense system on top of Apache Spark, which ensures
secure access control policy enforcement under adversaries capable of executing
code.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fine-grained attribute-based
access control framework for distributed data analytics platforms that is
secure against platform API abuse attacks. Performance evaluation showed that
the overhead due to added security is low
Why Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side?
Raphael Cohen-Almagor, the author of Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side, explains his motivation for exploring the dangerous side of the world wide web. This new book is the first comprehensive book on social responsibility on the Internet
Human Relations Report
Any assessment of the state of human relations in the Chicago region needs to be multidimensional. At its most basic, such an assessment involves the quality of relationships, or relations, among individuals. Relations may manifest themselves in families, among friends, within neighborhoods, or in work, religious, educational, recreational or other social settings. There are no widely accepted measures of the quality of human relations, in part because different commentators view the subject differently. Quality human relations may have several outcomes: for people to be satisfied or experience a good quality of life; for people to be supportive and helpful to one another; or for people to treat one another fairly and equally.In some social settings, individuals with common characteristics share a common fate or have similar life experiences and opportunities. Other social settings are marked more by differences among groups than commonalities. Such differences can be readily observed in the cases of different racial, ethnic, age or language groups; among persons sharing a gender or sexual orientation; or among the disabled. These social groupings seem to have the most impact on people's condition and identity
University undergraduate students and library-related privacy issues
New technologies increase the ability to capture and retrieve data about library usage patterns and users. Collecting, analyzing, and using patron data, however, may raise concerns among library users about their online privacy and how the data collected might be used to their advantage or disadvantage. This article examines undergraduate students\u27 knowledge and perceptions of online privacy issues, their opinions regarding who should collect and retain information about them, for what purposes, and under what circumstances
A TOSCA-Oriented Software-Defined Security Approach for Unikernel-Based Protected Clouds
International audienceCloud infrastructures provide new facilities to build elaborated added-value services by composing and configuring a large variety of computing resources, from virtualized hardware devices to software products. In the meantime, they are further exposed to security attacks than traditional environments. The complexity of security management tasks has been increased by the multi-tenancy, heterogeneity and geographical distribution of these resources. They introduce critical issues for cloud service providers and their customers, with respect to security programmability and scenarios of adaptation to contextual changes. In this paper, we propose a software-defined security approach based on the TOSCA language, to enable unikernel-based protected clouds. We first introduce extensions of this language to describe unikernels and specify security constraints for their orchestrations. We then describe an architecture exploiting this extended version of TOSCA for automatically generating, deploying and adjusting cloud resources in the form of protected unikernels with a low attack surface. We finally detail a proof-of-concept prototype, and evaluate the proposed solution through extensive series of experiments
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