An entity access control model for network services management

The Network Services Management Framework tries to overcome the most important limitations of present network management frameworks, namely the most widely supported framework – the Internet Network Management Framework – by defining a management framework using a network services management distributed architecture that provides services management functions with any desired level of functionality. This document introduces one of the most important parts of this framework, the Entity Access Control Model and the mechanisms needed to its deployment: management entities and management domains, entity access and resources control management, and security mechanisms (authentication, data integrity verification, confidentiality and non-repudiation assurances). This model, although originally developed to be integrated on the Network Services Management Framework, can be completely integrated or partially adopted by other frameworks since it supports a wide range of conceptual and functional requisites recognised to be fundamental to the future of modern distributed network management frameworks

Hardware-Assisted Dependable Systems

Unpredictable hardware faults and software bugs lead to application crashes, incorrect computations, unavailability of internet services, data losses, malfunctioning components, and consequently financial losses or even death of people. In particular, faults in microprocessors (CPUs) and memory corruption bugs are among the major unresolved issues of today. CPU faults may result in benign crashes and, more problematically, in silent data corruptions that can lead to catastrophic consequences, silently propagating from component to component and finally shutting down the whole system. Similarly, memory corruption bugs (memory-safety vulnerabilities) may result in a benign application crash but may also be exploited by a malicious hacker to gain control over the system or leak confidential data. Both these classes of errors are notoriously hard to detect and tolerate. Usual mitigation strategy is to apply ad-hoc local patches: checksums to protect specific computations against hardware faults and bug fixes to protect programs against known vulnerabilities. This strategy is unsatisfactory since it is prone to errors, requires significant manual effort, and protects only against anticipated faults. On the other extreme, Byzantine Fault Tolerance solutions defend against all kinds of hardware and software errors, but are inadequately expensive in terms of resources and performance overhead. In this thesis, we examine and propose five techniques to protect against hardware CPU faults and software memory-corruption bugs. All these techniques are hardware-assisted: they use recent advancements in CPU designs and modern CPU extensions. Three of these techniques target hardware CPU faults and rely on specific CPU features: ∆-encoding efficiently utilizes instruction-level parallelism of modern CPUs, Elzar re-purposes Intel AVX extensions, and HAFT builds on Intel TSX instructions. The rest two target software bugs: SGXBounds detects vulnerabilities inside Intel SGX enclaves, and “MPX Explained” analyzes the recent Intel MPX extension to protect against buffer overflow bugs. Our techniques achieve three goals: transparency, practicality, and efficiency. All our systems are implemented as compiler passes which transparently harden unmodified applications against hardware faults and software bugs. They are practical since they rely on commodity CPUs and require no specialized hardware or operating system support. Finally, they are efficient because they use hardware assistance in the form of CPU extensions to lower performance overhead

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF GEOMETRIC BASED CRYPTOGRAPHIC HASH ALGORITHM: ASH-256

Online communication takes a major part in our daily life. Since sending or receiving information over internet is inevitable, usage of hash function is essential to check whether the information is correct or not especially for sensitive or confidential information. In this paper a new cryptographic hash function, Algorithm for Secure Hashing (ASH-256) has been proposed which is based on geometric concepts. In ASH-256, each 64-bit block of a given 512-bit block is increased to 96-bits by using Expansion table (E-Table) of DES(Data Encryption Standard) algorithm and divided into two equal sub-blocks. Each sub-block is used to generate three points of a triangle, which are involved in area calculation. The calculated area values are in turn processed to generate message digest. ASH-256 is more secure and exhibits strong avalanche effect and also simple construction and easy to implemention, when compared to standard hash function SHA2(256)

Formally Reasoning about the Cost and Efficacy of Securing the Email Infrastructure (full version)

Security in the Internet has historically been added post-hoc, leaving services like email, which, after all, is used by 3.7 billion users, vulnerable to large-scale surveillance. For email alone, there is a multitude of proposals to mitigate known vulnerabilities, ranging from the introduction of completely new protocols to modifications of the communication paths used by big providers. Deciding which measures to deploy requires a deep understanding of the induced benefits, the cost and the resulting effects. This paper proposes the first automated methodology for making formal deployment assessments. Our planning algorithm analyses the impact and cost-efficiency of different known mitigation strategies against an attacker in a formal threat model. This novel formalisation of an infrastructure attacker includes routing, name resolution and application level weaknesses. We apply the methodology to a large-scale scan of the Internet, and assess how protocols like IPsec, DNSSEC, DANE, SMTP over TLS and other mitigation techniques like server relocation can be combined to improve the confidentiality of email users in 45 combinations of attacker and defender countries and nine cost scenarios. This is the first deployment analysis for mitigation techniques at this scale