Securing Humanitarian Information Exchange: A Mediator-Wrapper Architecture

Reliable and secure information exchange, which is crucial for successful response to crisis by humanitarian organizations, requires the responding groups to swiftly organize themselves in new and dynamic ways. Within these resulting impromptu structures, planning, negotiation, and coordination poses significant problems, due to the heterogeneity of the technologies in place. A plethora of technical solutions have been proposed to solve information exchange issues. However, they thought of security as an ad-hoc, especially authentication, authorization, and access control. This paper proposes a conceptual platform, the Secured Humanitarian Information Sharing Architecture (SHISA), that enables heterogeneous humanitarian systems to exchange information while considering authentication, authorization, and access control. SHISA standardizes communication through the exchange of encrypted XML documents. It uses the Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI) for authentication and authorization. The platform utilizes the mechanisms of indexing and impersonation to control data access so that humanitarian organizations\u27 users access only the information they need

More security or less insecurity

We depart from the conventional quest for ‘Completely Secure Systems’ and ask ‘How can we be more Secure’. We draw heavily from the evolution of the Theory of Justice and the arguments against the institutional approach to Justice. Central to our argument is the identification of redressable insecurity, or weak links. Our contention is that secure systems engineering is not really about building perfectly secure systems but about redressing manifest insecurities.Final Accepted Versio

DyVOSE project: experiences in applying privilege management infrastructures

Privilege Management Infrastructures (PMI) are emerging as a necessary alternative to authorization through Access Control Lists (ACL) as the need for finer grained security on the Grid increases in numerous domains. The 2-year JISC funded DyVOSE Project has investigated applying PMIs within an e-Science education context. This has involved establishing a Grid Computing module as part of Glasgow University’s Advanced MSc degree in Computing Science. A laboratory infrastructure was built for the students realising a PMI with the PERMIS software, to protect Grid Services they created. The first year of the course centered on building a static PMI at Glasgow. The second year extended this to allow dynamic attribute delegation between Glasgow and Edinburgh to support dynamic establishment of fine grained authorization based virtual organizations across multiple institutions. This dynamic delegation was implemented using the DIS (Delegation Issuing) Web Service supplied by the University of Kent. This paper describes the experiences and lessons learned from setting up and applying the advanced Grid authorization infrastructure within the Grid Computing course, focusing primarily on the second year and the dynamic virtual organisation setup between Glasgow and Edinburgh

Experiences in teaching grid computing to advanced level students

The development of teaching materials for future software engineers is critical to the long term success of the grid. At present however there is considerable turmoil in the grid community both within the standards and the technology base underpinning these standards. In this context, it is especially challenging to develop teaching materials that have some sort of lifetime beyond the next wave of grid middleware and standards. In addition, the current way in which grid security is supported and delivered has two key problems. Firstly in the case of the UK e-Science community, scalability issues arise from a central certificate authority. Secondly, the current security mechanisms used by the grid community are not line grained enough. In this paper we outline how these issues are being addressed through the development of a grid computing module supported by an advanced authorisation infrastructure at the University of Glasgow

Secure, reliable and dynamic access to distributed clinical data

An abundance of statistical and scientific data exists in the area of clinical and epidemiological studies. Much of this data is distributed across regional, national and international boundaries with different policies on access and usage, and a multitude of different schemata for the data often complicated by the variety of supporting clinical coding schemes. This prevents the wide scale collation and analysis of such data as is often needed to infer clinical outcomes and to determine the often moderate effect of drugs. Through grid technologies it is possible to overcome the barriers introduced by distribution of heterogeneous data and services. However reliability, dynamicity and fine-grained security are essential in this domain, and are not typically offered by current grids. The MRC funded VOTES project (Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies) has implemented a prototype infrastructure specifically designed to meet these challenges. This paper describes this on-going implementation effort and the lessons learned in building grid frameworks for and within a clinical environment

A Shibboleth-protected privilege management infrastructure for e-science education

Simplifying access to and usage of large scale compute resources via the grid is of critical importance to encourage the uptake of e-research. Security is one aspect that needs to be made as simple as possible for end users. The ESP-Grid and DyVOSE projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow are investigating security technologies which will make the end-user experience of using the grid easier and more secure. In this paper, we outline how simplified (from the user experience) authentication and authorization of users are achieved through single usernames and passwords at users' home institutions. This infrastructure, which will be applied in the second year of the grid computing module part of the advanced MSc in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, combines grid portal technology, the Internet2 Shibboleth Federated Access Control infrastructure, and the PERMS role-based access control technology. Through this infrastructure inter-institutional teaching can be supported where secure access to federated resources is made possible between sites. A key aspect of the work we describe here is the ability to support dynamic delegation of authority whereby local/remote administrators are able to dynamically assign meaningful privileges to remote/local users respectively in a trusted manner thus allowing for the dynamic establishment of virtual organizations with fine grained security at their heart

Semantic security: specification and enforcement of semantic policies for security-driven collaborations

Collaborative research can often have demands on finer-grained security that go beyond the authentication-only paradigm as typified by many e-Infrastructure/Grid based solutions. Supporting finer-grained access control is often essential for domains where the specification and subsequent enforcement of authorization policies is needed. The clinical domain is one area in particular where this is so. However it is the case that existing security authorization solutions are fragile, inflexible and difficult to establish and maintain. As a result they often do not meet the needs of real world collaborations where robustness and flexibility of policy specification and enforcement, and ease of maintenance are essential. In this paper we present results of the JISC funded Advanced Grid Authorisation through Semantic Technologies (AGAST) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/agast) and show how semantic-based approaches to security policy specification and enforcement can address many of the limitations with existing security solutions. These are demonstrated into the clinical trials domain through the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/votes) and the epidemiological domain through the JISC funded SeeGEO project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/seegeo)

From access and integration to mining of secure genomic data sets across the grid

The UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) funded BRIDGES project (Biomedical Research Informatics Delivered by Grid Enabled Services) has developed a Grid infrastructure to support cardiovascular research. This includes the provision of a compute Grid and a data Grid infrastructure with security at its heart. In this paper we focus on the BRIDGES data Grid. A primary aim of the BRIDGES data Grid is to help control the complexity in access to and integration of a myriad of genomic data sets through simple Grid based tools. We outline these tools, how they are delivered to the end user scientists. We also describe how these tools are to be extended in the BBSRC funded Grid Enabled Microarray Expression Profile Search (GEMEPS) to support a richer vocabulary of search capabilities to support mining of microarray data sets. As with BRIDGES, fine grain Grid security underpins GEMEPS

Security Service Model for RFID Enabled Supply Chain

It has been widely recognized that RFID related technologies will greatly improve the visibility, the efficiency and the collaboration of industry supply chain. In this new “product driven“ supply chain scenario, manufacturer, supplier, and third party share and coordinate the use of diverse resources in distributed “virtual organizations”. It challenges the security issues, which demand new technical approaches. In collaboration with researchers in Auto-ID Labs China, we have developed a service-oriented framework based on CA and Web Services, which supports inexpensive mediation of product information among rapidly evolving, heterogeneous information sources. Our architecture defines a user-driven security model that allows users to create entities and policy domains within virtual organizations. We emphasize that standard Web Services tools and software provide both stateless and stateful forms of secured communication