Typing access control and secure information flow in sessions

International audienceWe consider a calculus for multiparty sessions with delegation, enriched with security levels for session participants and data. We propose a type system that guarantees both session safety and a form of access control. Moreover, this type system ensures secure information flow, including controlled forms of declassification. In particular, it prevents information leaks due to the specific control constructs of the calculus, such as session opening, selection, branching and delegation. We illustrate the use of our type system with a number of examples, which reveal an interesting interplay between the constraints of security type systems and those used in session types to ensure properties like communication safety and session fidelity

Combining behavioural types with security analysis

Today's software systems are highly distributed and interconnected, and they increasingly rely on communication to achieve their goals; due to their societal importance, security and trustworthiness are crucial aspects for the correctness of these systems. Behavioural types, which extend data types by describing also the structured behaviour of programs, are a widely studied approach to the enforcement of correctness properties in communicating systems. This paper offers a unified overview of proposals based on behavioural types which are aimed at the analysis of security properties

Secure Multiparty Sessions with Topics

Multiparty session calculi have been recently equipped with security requirements, in order to guarantee properties such as access control and leak freedom. However, the proposed security requirements seem to be overly restrictive in some cases. In particular, a party is not allowed to communicate any kind of public information after receiving a secret information. This does not seem justified in case the two pieces of information are totally unrelated. The aim of the present paper is to overcome this restriction, by designing a type discipline for a simple multiparty session calculus, which classifies messages according to their topics and allows unrestricted sequencing of messages on independent topics.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2016, arXiv:1606.0540

Computing infrastructure issues in distributed communications systems : a survey of operating system transport system architectures

The performance of distributed applications (such as file transfer, remote login, tele-conferencing, full-motion video, and scientific visualization) is influenced by several factors that interact in complex ways. In particular, application performance is significantly affected both by communication infrastructure factors and computing infrastructure factors. Several communication infrastructure factors include channel speed, bit-error rate, and congestion at intermediate switching nodes. Computing infrastructure factors include (among other things) both protocol processing activities (such as connection management, flow control, error detection, and retransmission) and general operating system factors (such as memory latency, CPU speed, interrupt and context switching overhead, process architecture, and message buffering). Due to a several orders of magnitude increase in network channel speed and an increase in application diversity, performance bottlenecks are shifting from the network factors to the transport system factors.This paper defines an abstraction called an "Operating System Transport System Architecture" (OSTSA) that is used to classify the major components and services in the computing infrastructure. End-to-end network protocols such as TCP, TP4, VMTP, XTP, and Delta-t typically run on general-purpose computers, where they utilize various operating system resources such as processors, virtual memory, and network controllers. The OSTSA provides services that integrate these resources to support distributed applications running on local and wide area networks.A taxonomy is presented to evaluate OSTSAs in terms of their support for protocol processing activities. We use this taxonomy to compare and contrast five general-purpose commercial and experimental operating systems including System V UNIX, BSD UNIX, the x-kernel, Choices, and Xinu

Conceptual Model for Communication

A variety of idealized models of communication systems exist, and all may have something in common. Starting with Shannons communication model and ending with the OSI model, this paper presents progressively more advanced forms of modeling of communication systems by tying communication models together based on the notion of flow. The basic communication process is divided into different spheres (sources, channels, and destinations), each with its own five interior stages, receiving, processing, creating, releasing, and transferring of information. The flow of information is ontologically distinguished from the flow of physical signals, accordingly, Shannons model, network based OSI models, and TCP IP are redesigned.Comment: 13 pages IEEE format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS November 2009, ISSN 1947 5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis

Quality of Service over Specific Link Layers: state of the art report

The Integrated Services concept is proposed as an enhancement to the current Internet architecture, to provide a better Quality of Service (QoS) than that provided by the traditional Best-Effort service. The features of the Integrated Services are explained in this report. To support Integrated Services, certain requirements are posed on the underlying link layer. These requirements are studied by the Integrated Services over Specific Link Layers (ISSLL) IETF working group. The status of this ongoing research is reported in this document. To be more specific, the solutions to provide Integrated Services over ATM, IEEE 802 LAN technologies and low-bitrate links are evaluated in detail. The ISSLL working group has not yet studied the requirements, that are posed on the underlying link layer, when this link layer is wireless. Therefore, this state of the art report is extended with an identification of the requirements that are posed on the underlying wireless link, to provide differentiated Quality of Service

Mobility Management in beyond 3G-Environments

Beyond 3G-environments are typically defined as environments that integrate different wireless and fixed access network technologies. In this paper, we address IP based Mobility Management (MM) in beyond 3G-environments with a focus on wireless access networks, motivated by the current trend of WiFi, GPRS, and UMTS networks. The GPRS and UMTS networks provide countrywide network access, while the WiFi networks provide network access in local areas such as city centres and airports. As a result, mobile end-users can be always on-line and connected to their preferred network(s), these network preferences are typically stored in a user profile. For example, an end-user who wishes to be connected with highest bandwidth could be connected to a WiFi network when available and fall back to GPRS when moving outside the hotspot area.\ud In this paper, we consider a combination of MM for legacy services (like web browsing, telnet, etc.) using Mobile IP and multimedia services using SIP. We assume that the end-user makes use of multi-interface terminals with the capability of selecting one or more types of access networks\ud based on preferences. For multimedia sessions, like VoIP or streaming video, we distinguish between changes in network access when the end-user is in a session or not in a session. If the end-user is not in a session, he or she needs to be able to start new sessions and receive invitations for new sessions. If the end-user is in a session, the session needs to be handed over to the new access network as seamless as possible from the perspective of the end-user. We propose an integrated but flexible solution to these problems that facilitates MM with a customizable transparency to applications and end-users