Electronic Regulation of Data Sharing and Processing Using Smart Ledger Technologies for Supply-Chain Security

Traditional centralized data storage and processing solutions manifest limitations with regards to overall operational cost and the security and auditability of data. One of the biggest issues with existing solutions is the difficulty of keeping track of who has had access to the data and how the data may have changed over its lifetime; while providing a secure and easy-to-use mechanism to share the data between different users. The ability to electronically regulate data sharing within and across different organizational entities in the supply chain (SC) is an open issue that is only addressed partially by existing legal and regulatory compliance frameworks. In this article, we present Cydon, a decentralized data management platform that executes bespoke distributed applications utilizing a novel search and retrieve algorithm leveraging metadata attributes. Cydon utilizes a smart distributed ledger to offer an immutable audit trail and transaction history for all different levels of data access and modification within a SC and for all data flows within the environment. Results suggest that Cydon provides authorized and fast access to secure distributed data, avoids single points of failure by securely distributing encrypted data across different nodes while maintains an “always-on” chain of custody

Privacy Enhanced Secure Tropos: A Privacy Modeling Language for GDPR Compliance

Euroopa Liidu isikuandmete kaitse üldmäärusele (GDPR) vastavuse tagamine saab õiguslikult hädavajalikuks kõigis tarkvarasüsteemides, mis töötlevad ja haldavad isikuandmeid. Sellest tulenevalt tuleb GDPR vastavuse ja privaatsuse komponentidega arvestada arendusprotsessi varajastes etappides ning tarkvarainsenerid peaksid analüüsima mitte ainult süsteemi, vaid ka selle keskkonda. Käesolev uuring keskendub viimasel ajal tähepepanu pälvinud modelleerimiskeelele Privacy Enhanced Secure Tropos (PESTOS), mis põhineb Tropos metoodikal, hõlmates eesmärkide ja reeglite vaatenurka, mis aitab tarkvarainseneridel hinnata erinevaid Privacy-enhancing Technologies (PET-e) kandidaate, arendades samas privaatsustundlikke süsteeme, et need oleksid GDPR-iga kooskõlas.Kuigi GDPR artikli 5 lõikes 2 sätestatakse, et vastutuse põhimõtte kohaselt peavad organisatsioonid suutma näidata vastavust GDPR põhimõtetele (meie teadmiste kohaselt ei ole praegu veel ühtegi teist privaatsuse modelleerimise keelt, mis keskendub eelkõige GDPR nõuetele ja mis põhineb Security Risk-Aware Secure Tropos metoodikal), ei olnud saadaval ühtegi praktilist modelleerimise keelt, mis rahuldaks tööstus- ja ärivajadusi. See on Euroopa Liidu piirkonna avalikele asutustele ja erasektorile tõsine probleem, kuna GDPR toob vastutavatele ja volitatud töötlejatele kaasa väga tõsiseid trahve. Organisatsioonid ei oma piisavat kindlustunnet regulatsioonide täitmise osas ja tarkvarainseneridel puuduvad meetodid saamaks ülevaadet infosüsteemide muutmistaotlustest. Käesolevas lõputöös rakendatakse struktureeritud privaatsuse modelleerimise keelt, mida nimetatakse PESTOS-iks. Selle eesmärk on tagada kõrgetasemeline vastavus GDPR nõuetele kattes PET-e eesmärk-tegija-reegel perspektiivis hindamiseks ka lõimitud andmekaitse põhimõtted. GDPR 99-st artiklist 21 artiklit saab identifitseerida tehniliste nõudmistena, mile osas PESTOS suudab ettvõtetel aidata GDPR-ist tulenevaid kohustusi täita. Identiteedi- ja turvaekspertide seas läbiviidud uuring kinnitab, et kavandatud mudelil on piisav õigsus, täielikkus, tootlikkus ja kasutusmugavus.The European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance is becoming a legal necessity for software systems that process and manage personal data. As a result of that fact, GDPR compliance and privacy components need to be considered from the early stages of the development process and software engineers should analyze not only the system but also its environment. Hereby with this study, Privacy Enhanced Secure Tropos (PESTOS) is emerging as a privacy modeling language based on Tropos methodology, which covers the goal and rule perspective, for helping software engineers by assessing candidate PETs, while designing privacy-aware systems, in order to make them compatible with GDPR. Although in Article 5(2) of the GDPR, the accountability principle requires organizations to show compliance with the principles of the GDPR, (To the best of our knowledge, currently there is no other privacy modeling language especially focuses on the GDPR compliance and enhanced based on Security Risk-Aware Secure Tropos methodology) there were not any practical social modeling languages supply the demand driven by industrial and commercial needs. This is a serious issue for public institutions and private sector in EU-zone because GDPR brings very serious charges for data controllers and data processors, therefore organizations do not feel themselves ready to face with those regulations and software engineers have a lack of methods for capturing change requests of the information systems. This paper applies a structured privacy modeling language that is called as PESTOS which has a goal-oriented solution domain that aims to bring a high compatibility with GDPR by covering Privacy by Design strategies for assessing proper privacy-enhancing technologies(PETs) in a respect of the goal-actor-rule perspective. Among the 99 articles of GDPR, 21 articles can be identified as technical level of requirements that PESTOS is able to transform them into GDPR goals needs to be fulfilled in order to support business assets. A survey conducted by identity and security experts validates that proposed model has a sufficient level of correctness, completeness, productivity and ease of use

Global Data Plane: A Widely Distributed Storage and Communication Infrastructure

With the advancement of technology, richer computation devices are making their way into everyday life. However, such smarter devices merely act as a source and sink of information; the storage of information is highly centralized in data-centers in today’s world. Even though such data-centers allow for amortization of cost per bit of information, the density and distribution of such data-centers is not necessarily representative of human population density. This disparity of where the information is produced and consumed vs where it is stored only slightly affects the applications of today, but it will be the limiting factor for applications of tomorrow.The computation resources at the edge are more powerful than ever, and present an opportunity to address this disparity. We envision that a seamless combination of these edge-resources with the data-center resources is the way forward. However, the resulting issues of trust and data-security are not easy to solve in a world full of complexity. Toward this vision of a federated infrastructure composed of resources at the edge as well as those in data-centers, we describe the architecture and design of a widely distributed system for data storage and communication that attempts to alleviate some of these data security challenges; we call this system the Global Data Plane (GDP).The key abstraction in the GDP is a secure cohesive container of information called a DataCapsule, which provides a layer of uniformity on top of a heterogeneous infrastructure. A DataCapsule represents a secure history of transactions in a persistent form that can be used for building other applications on top. Existing applications can be refactored to use DataCapsules as the ground truth of persistent state; such a refactoring enables cleaner application design that allows for better security analysis of information flows. Not only cleaner design, the GDP also enables locality of access for performance and data privacy—an ever growing concern in the information age.The DataCapsules are enabled by an underlying routing fabric, called the GDP network, which provides secure routing for datagrams in a flat namespace. The GDP network is a core component of the GDP that enables various GDP components to interact with each other. In addition to the DataCapsules, this underlying network is available to applications for native communication as well. Flat namespace networks are known to provide a number of desirable properties, such as location independence, built-in multicast, etc. However, existing architectures for such networks suffer from routing security issues, typically because malicious entities can claim to possess arbitrary names and thus, receive traffic intended for arbitrary destinations. GDP network takes a different approach by defining an ownership of the name and the associated mechanisms for participants to delegate routing for such names to others. By directly integrating with GDP network, applications can enjoy the benefits of flat namespace networks without compromising routing security.The Global Data Plane and DataCapsules together represent our vision for secure ubiquitous storage. As opposed to the current approach of perimeter security for infrastructure, i.e. drawing a perimeter around parts of infrastructure and trusting everything inside it, our vision is to use cryptographic tools to enable intrinsic security for the information itself regardless of the context in which such information lives. In this dissertation, we show how to make this vision a reality, and how to adapt real world applications to reap the benefits of secure ubiquitous storage

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Security in Mobile Multiagent Systems

This report contains the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Security on Security of Mobile Multiagent Systems (SEMAS2002). The Workshop was held in Montreal, Canada as a satellite event to the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents in 2001. The far reaching influence of the Internet has resulted in an increased interest in agent technologies, which are poised to play a key role in the implementation of successful Internet and WWW-based applications in the future. While there is still considerable hype concerning agent technologies, there is also an increasing awareness of the problems involved. In particular, that these applications will not be successful unless security issues can be adequately handled. Although there is a large body of work on cryptographic techniques that provide basic building-blocks to solve specific security problems, relatively little work has been done in investigating security in the multiagent system context. Related problems are secure communication between agents, implementation of trust models/authentication procedures or even reflections of agents on security mechanisms. The introduction of mobile software agents significantly increases the risks involved in Internet and WWW-based applications. For example, if we allow agents to enter our hosts or private networks, we must offer the agents a platform so that they can execute correctly but at the same time ensure that they will not have deleterious effects on our hosts or any other agents / processes in our network. If we send out mobile agents, we should also be able to provide guarantees about specific aspects of their behaviour, i.e., we are not only interested in whether the agents carry out-out their intended task correctly. They must defend themselves against attacks initiated by other agents, and survive in potentially malicious environments. Agent technologies can also be used to support network security. For example in the context of intrusion detection, intelligent guardian agents may be used to analyse the behaviour of agents on a firewall or intelligent monitoring agents can be used to analyse the behaviour of agents migrating through a network. Part of the inspiration for such multi-agent systems comes from primitive animal behaviour, such as that of guardian ants protecting their hill or from biological immune systems

A secure architecture enabling end-user privacy in the context of commercial wide-area location-enhanced web services

Mobile location-based services have raised privacy concerns amongst mobile phone users who may need to supply their identity and location information to untrustworthy third parties in order to access these applications. Widespread acceptance of such services may therefore depend on how privacy sensitive information will be handled in order to restore users’ confidence in what could become the “killer app” of 3G networks. The work reported in this thesis is part of a larger project to provide a secure architecture to enable the delivery of location-based services over the Internet. The security of transactions and in particular the privacy of the information transmitted has been the focus of our research. In order to protect mobile users’ identities, we have designed and implemented a proxy-based middleware called the Orient Platform together with its Orient Protocol, capable of translating their real identity into pseudonyms. In order to protect users’ privacy in terms of location information, we have designed and implemented a Location Blurring algorithm that intentionally downgrades the quality of location information to be used by location-based services. The algorithm takes into account a blurring factor set by the mobile user at her convenience and blurs her location by preventing real-time tracking by unauthorized entities. While it penalizes continuous location tracking, it returns accurate and reliable information in response to sporadic location queries. Finally, in order to protect the transactions and provide end-to-end security between all the entities involved, we have designed and implemented a Public Key Infrastructure based on a Security Mediator (SEM) architecture. The cryptographic algorithms used are identitybased, which makes digital certificate retrieval, path validation and revocation redundant in our environment. In particular we have designed and implemented a cryptographic scheme based on Hess’ work [108], which represents, to our knowledge, the first identity-based signature scheme in the SEM setting. A special private key generation process has also been developed in order to enable entities to use a single private key in conjunction with multiple pseudonyms, which significantly simplifies key management. We believe our approach satisfies the security requirements of mobile users and can help restore their confidence in location-based services

Naming and sharing resources across administrative boundaries

I tackle the problem of naming and sharing resources across administrative boundaries. Conventional systems manifest the hierarchy of typical administrative structure in the structure of their own mechanism. While natural for communication that follows hierarchical patterns, such systems interfere with naming and sharing that cross administrative boundaries, and therefore cause headaches for both users and administrators. I propose to organize resource naming and security, not around administrative domains, but around the sharing patterns of users. The dissertation is organized into four main parts. First, I discuss the challenges and tradeoffs involved in naming resources and consider a variety of existing approaches to naming. Second, I consider the architectural requirements for user-centric sharing. I evaluate existing systems with respect to these requirements. Third, to support the sharing architecture, I develop a formal logic of sharing that captures the notion of restricted delegation. Restricted delegation ensures that users can use the same mechanisms to share resources consistently, regardless of the origin of the resource, or with whom the user wishes to share the resource next. A formal semantics gives unambiguous meaning to the logic. I apply the formalism to the Simple Public Key Infrastructure and discuss how the formalism either supports or discourages potential extensions to such a system. Finally, I use the formalism to drive a user-centric sharing implementation for distributed systems. I show how this implementation enables end-to-end authorization, a feature that makes heterogeneous distributed systems more secure and easier to audit. Conventionally, gateway services that bridge administrative domains, add abstraction, or translate protocols typically impede the flow of authorization information from client to server. In contrast, end-to-end authorization enables us to build gateway services that preserve authorization information, hence we reduce the size of the trusted computing base and enable more effective auditing. I demonstrate my implementation and show how it enables end-to-end authorization across various boundaries. I measure my implementation and argue that its performance tracks that of similar authorization mechanisms without end-to-end structure. I conclude that my user-centric philosophy of naming and sharing benefits both users and administrators