Nation-State Attackers and their Effects on Computer Security

Nation-state intelligence agencies have long attempted to operate in secret, but recent revelations have drawn the attention of security researchers as well as the general public to their operations. The scale, aggressiveness, and untargeted nature of many of these now public operations were not only alarming, but also baffling as many were thought impossible or at best infeasible at scale. The security community has since made many efforts to protect end-users by identifying, analyzing, and mitigating these now known operations. While much-needed, the security community's response has largely been reactionary to the oracled existence of vulnerabilities and the disclosure of specific operations. Nation-State Attackers, however, are dynamic, forward-thinking, and surprisingly agile adversaries who do not rest on their laurels and are continually advancing their efforts to obtain information. Without the ability to conceptualize their actions, understand their perspective, or account for their presence, the security community's advances will become antiquated and unable to defend against the progress of Nation-State Attackers. In this work, we present and discuss a model of Nation-State Attackers that can be used to represent their attributes, behavior patterns, and world view. We use this representation of Nation-State Attackers to show that real-world threat models do not account for such highly privileged attackers, to identify and support technical explanations of known but ambiguous operations, and to identify and analyze vulnerabilities in current systems that are favorable to Nation-State Attackers.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143907/1/aaspring_1.pd

SecMVC : a model for secure software design based on the model-view-controller pattern

Current advances in the software development industry are growing more ubiquitous by the day. This has caused for security, not only in the broader sense, but specifically within the design and overall development of software itself, to become all the more important. An evidently prevalent problem in the domain of software development is that software security is not consistently addressed during design, which undermines core security concerns, and leads to the development of insecure software. This research seeks to address this issue via a model for secure software design, which is based on a software design pattern, namely, the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The use of a pattern to convey knowledge is not a new notion. However, the ability of software design patterns to convey secure software design is an idea worth investigating. Following identification of secure software design principles and concepts, as well as software design patterns, specifically those relating to the MVC pattern, a model was designed and developed. With the MVC pattern argued as being a suitable foundation for the model, the security conscious MVC (SecMVC) combines secure software design principles and concepts into the MVC pattern. Together herewith, the MVC pattern’s components in the MVC Compound pattern, namely: the Observer pattern, the Strategy pattern, and the Composite pattern, have provided further sub-models for less abstraction and greater detail. These sub-models were developed, as a result of the SecMVC model’s evaluation in the validation for this study, an expert review. Argued in the light of similar research methods, the expert review was chosen – along with a process that included the use of two expert participants to validate the SecMVC model. It was determined through the expert review that the SecMVC model is of sufficient utility, quality, and efficacy to constitute research value. The research methodology process followed was design science, in which the SecMVC model, which includes its related sub-models, serves as the artefact and research output of this study. This research study contributes evidence of the feasibility for integrating knowledge into software design patterns. This includes the SecMVC model itself. In addition, it argues for the use of an expert review, as an evaluative research method for such an artifact