BYOD NETWORK: Enhancing Security through Trust–Aided Access Control Mechanisms

The growth of mobile devices both in variety and in computational abilities have given birth to a concept in the corporate world known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Under this concept, Employees are allowed to bring personally owned mobile devices for official work. Though relatively new, it has gained up to 53% patronage among organisations, and it is expected to hit 88% in the near future. Its popularity is driven by significant advantages ranging from reduced cost, employee satisfaction to improved productivity. However, the concept also introduces new security challenges; for instance, the organisation looses the ownership of devices used for official work, to the employees. Implying that the employees own and manage the devices they use to work, including seeing to the security needs of such devices. With this development, protecting the corporate network becomes pertinent and even more challenging with an audacious need for outwittingconventional access control mechanisms, giving the highly dynamic nature of mobile devices. Considering the fact that BYOD is also a type of pervasive/dynamic environment, this work studies similar dynamic environments, relating to how their security challenges are addressed, and from such bases a Trust-Aided Dynamic Access Control Approach is proposed for enhancing the security of BYOD devices. Through computational analysis, this scheme has been seen to be security-compliant and could significantly improving the overall security of BYOD networks

Expressive Policy-Based Access Control for Resource-Constrained Devices

Upcoming smart scenarios enabled by the Internet of Things envision smart objects that expose services that can adapt to user behavior or be managed with the goal of achieving higher productivity, often in multi-stakeholder applications. In such environments, smart things are cheap sensors (and actuators) and, therefore, constrained devices. However, they are also critical components because of the importance of the provided information. Therefore, strong security is a must. Nevertheless, existing feasible approaches do not cope well with the principle of least privilege; they lack both expressiveness and the ability to update the policy to be enforced in the sensors. In this paper, we propose an access control model that comprises a policy language that provides dynamic fine-grained policy enforcement in the sensors based on local context conditions. This dynamic policy cycle requires a secure, efficient, and traceable message exchange protocol. For that purpose, a security protocol called Hidra is also proposed. A security and performance evaluation demonstrates the feasibility and adequacy of the proposed protocol and access control model.This work was supported in part by the Training and Research Unit through UPV/EHU under Grant UFI11/16 and in part by the Department of Economic Development and Competitiveness of the Basque Government through the Security Technologies SEKUTEK Collaborative Research Projec

A review of cyber threats and defence approaches in emergency management

Emergency planners, first responders and relief workers increasingly rely on computational and communication systems that support all aspects of emergency management, from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery. Failure of these systems, whether accidental or because of malicious action, can have severe implications for emergency management. Accidental failures have been extensively documented in the past and significant effort has been put into the development and introduction of more resilient technologies. At the same time researchers have been raising concerns about the potential of cyber attacks to cause physical disasters or to maximise the impact of one by intentionally impeding the work of the emergency services. Here, we provide a review of current research on the cyber threats to communication, sensing, information management and vehicular technologies used in emergency management. We emphasise on open issues for research, which are the cyber threats that have the potential to affect emergency management severely and for which solutions have not yet been proposed in the literature

Protocol for a Systematic Literature Review on Security-related Research in Ubiquitous Computing

Context: This protocol is as a supplementary document to our review paper that investigates security-related challenges and solutions that have occurred during the past decade (from January 2003 to December 2013). Objectives: The objective of this systematic review is to identify security-related challenges, security goals and defenses in ubiquitous computing by answering to three main research questions. First, demographic data and trends will be given by analyzing where, when and by whom the research has been carried out. Second, we will identify security goals that occur in ubiquitous computing, along with attacks, vulnerabilities and threats that have motivated the research. Finally, we will examine the differences in addressing security in ubiquitous computing with those in traditional distributed systems. Method: In order to provide an overview of security-related challenges, goals and solutions proposed in the literature, we will use a systematic literature review (SLR). This protocol describes the steps which are to be taken in order to identify papers relevant to the objective of our review. The first phase of the method includes planning, in which we define the scope of our review by identifying the main research questions, search procedure, as well as inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data extracted from the relevant papers are to be used in the second phase of the method, data synthesis, to answer our research questions. The review will end by reporting on the results. Results and conclusions: The expected results of the review should provide an overview of attacks, vulnerabilities and threats that occur in ubiquitous computing and that have motivated the research in the last decade. Moreover, the review will indicate which security goals are gaining on their significance in the era of ubiquitous computing and provide a categorization of the security-related countermeasures, mechanisms and techniques found in the literature. (authors' abstract)Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operation

Indeterminacy-aware prediction model for authentication in IoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has opened a new chapter in data access. It has brought obvious opportunities as well as major security and privacy challenges. Access control is one of the challenges in IoT. This holds true as the existing, conventional access control paradigms do not fit into IoT, thus access control requires more investigation and remains an open issue. IoT has a number of inherent characteristics, including scalability, heterogeneity and dynamism, which hinder access control. While most of the impact of these characteristics have been well studied in the literature, we highlighted “indeterminacy” in authentication as a neglected research issue. This work stresses that an indeterminacy-resilient model for IoT authentication is missing from the literature. According to our findings, indeterminacy consists of at least two facets: “uncertainty” and “ambiguity”. As a result, various relevant theories were studied in this work. Our proposed framework is based on well-known machine learning models and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). To implement and evaluate our framework, we first generate datasets, in which the location of the users is a main dataset attribute, with the aim to analyse the role of user mobility in the performance of the prediction models. Next, multiple classification algorithms were used with our datasets in order to build our best-fit prediction models. Our results suggest that our prediction models are able to determine the class of the authentication requests while considering both the uncertainty and ambiguity in the IoT system

Towards Secure and Usable Leakage-Resilient Password Entry

Password leakage is one of the most common security threats for pervasive password based user authentication. The design of a secure and usable password entry against password leakage remains a challenge since twenty year ago when the first academic proposal attempted to address it. This dissertation focuses on investigating the difficulty in designing leakage-resilient password entry (LRPE) schemes and exploring the feasibility of constructing secure and usable LRPE schemes with the assistance of state-of-the-art technology. The first work in this dissertation reveals the infeasibility of designing practical LRPE schemes in the absence of trusted devices by investigating the inherent tradeoff between security and usability in LRPE design. We start with demonstrating that most of the existing LRPE schemes without using trusted devices are subject to two types of generic attacks - brute force and statistical attacks, whose power has been underestimated in the literature. In order to defend against these two generic attacks, we introduce five design principles that are necessary to achieve leakage resilience in the absence of trusted devices. We show that these attacks cannot be effectively mitigated without significantly sacrificing the usability of LRPE schemes. To better understand the tradeoff between security and usability of LRPE schemes, we further propose a quantitative analysis framework on usability costs of password entry schemes based on experimental psychology. Our analysis shows that a secure LRPE scheme in practical settings always imposes a considerable amount of cognitive workload on its users, which indicates the inherent limitations of such schemes and in turn implies that an LRPE scheme has to incorporate certain trusted device in order to be both secure and usable. Following the first work, we further explore the feasibility of designing practical LRPE schemes by analyzing the existing LRPE schemes that utilize trusted devices. We develop a broad set of design metrics which cover three aspects in evaluating LRPE schemes, including quantitative usability costs with specified security strength, built-in security, and universal accessibility. We apply these design metrics on existing LRPE schemes, revealing that all the schemes have limitations, which may explain why none of them are widely adopted. However, our further analysis indicates that it is possible to overcome these limitations by improving the design according to the proposed metrics. Guided by these design metrics, we propose a secure and usable LRPE scheme leveraging on the touchscreen feature of mobile devices. These devices provide additional features such as touchscreen that are not available in the traditional settings, which makes it possible to achieve both security and usability objectives that are difficult to achieve in the past. Our scheme named CoverPad achieves leakage resilience while retaining most benefits of legacy passwords. The usability of CoverPad is evaluated with an extended user study which includes additional test conditions related to time pressure, distraction, and mental workload. These test conditions simulate common situations for a password entry scheme used on a daily basis, which have not been evaluated in the prior literature. The results of our user study show the impacts of these test conditions on user performance as well as the practicability of the proposed scheme. This dissertation makes contributions on understanding and solving the problem of designing secure and usable LRPE schemes. The proposed design principles, design metrics, analysis and evaluation methodologies are applicable to not only LRPE schemes but also generic user authentication schemes, which provide useful insights for the field of user authentication research. The proposed scheme has been implemented as a prototype, which can be used to effectively defend against password leakage during password entry

Demystifying Internet of Things Security

Break down the misconceptions of the Internet of Things by examining the different security building blocks available in Intel Architecture (IA) based IoT platforms. This open access book reviews the threat pyramid, secure boot, chain of trust, and the SW stack leading up to defense-in-depth. The IoT presents unique challenges in implementing security and Intel has both CPU and Isolated Security Engine capabilities to simplify it. This book explores the challenges to secure these devices to make them immune to different threats originating from within and outside the network. The requirements and robustness rules to protect the assets vary greatly and there is no single blanket solution approach to implement security. Demystifying Internet of Things Security provides clarity to industry professionals and provides and overview of different security solutions What You'll Learn Secure devices, immunizing them against different threats originating from inside and outside the network Gather an overview of the different security building blocks available in Intel Architecture (IA) based IoT platforms Understand the threat pyramid, secure boot, chain of trust, and the software stack leading up to defense-in-depth Who This Book Is For Strategists, developers, architects, and managers in the embedded and Internet of Things (IoT) space trying to understand and implement the security in the IoT devices/platforms

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio