1,326 research outputs found

    CYCLOSA: Decentralizing Private Web Search Through SGX-Based Browser Extensions

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    By regularly querying Web search engines, users (unconsciously) disclose large amounts of their personal data as part of their search queries, among which some might reveal sensitive information (e.g. health issues, sexual, political or religious preferences). Several solutions exist to allow users querying search engines while improving privacy protection. However, these solutions suffer from a number of limitations: some are subject to user re-identification attacks, while others lack scalability or are unable to provide accurate results. This paper presents CYCLOSA, a secure, scalable and accurate private Web search solution. CYCLOSA improves security by relying on trusted execution environments (TEEs) as provided by Intel SGX. Further, CYCLOSA proposes a novel adaptive privacy protection solution that reduces the risk of user re- identification. CYCLOSA sends fake queries to the search engine and dynamically adapts their count according to the sensitivity of the user query. In addition, CYCLOSA meets scalability as it is fully decentralized, spreading the load for distributing fake queries among other nodes. Finally, CYCLOSA achieves accuracy of Web search as it handles the real query and the fake queries separately, in contrast to other existing solutions that mix fake and real query results

    Towards Secure and Leak-Free Workflows Using Microservice Isolation

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    Data leaks and breaches are on the rise. They result in huge losses of money for businesses like the movie industry, as well as a loss of user privacy for businesses dealing with user data like the pharmaceutical industry. Preventing data exposures is challenging, because the causes for such events are various, ranging from hacking to misconfigured databases. Alongside the surge in data exposures, the recent rise of microservices as a paradigm brings the need to not only secure traffic at the border of the network, but also internally, pressing the adoption of new security models such as zero-trust to secure business processes. Business processes can be modeled as workflows, where the owner of the data at risk interacts with contractors to realize a sequence of tasks on this data. In this paper, we show how those workflows can be enforced while preventing data exposure. Following the principles of zero-trust, we develop an infrastructure using the isolation provided by a microservice architecture, to enforce owner policy. We show that our infrastructure is resilient to the set of attacks considered in our security model. We implement a simple, yet realistic, workflow with our infrastructure in a publicly available proof of concept. We then verify that the specified policy is correctly enforced by testing the deployment for policy violations, and estimate the overhead cost of authorization

    Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

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    Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure
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