5,083 research outputs found
LightBox: Full-stack Protected Stateful Middlebox at Lightning Speed
Running off-site software middleboxes at third-party service providers has
been a popular practice. However, routing large volumes of raw traffic, which
may carry sensitive information, to a remote site for processing raises severe
security concerns. Prior solutions often abstract away important factors
pertinent to real-world deployment. In particular, they overlook the
significance of metadata protection and stateful processing. Unprotected
traffic metadata like low-level headers, size and count, can be exploited to
learn supposedly encrypted application contents. Meanwhile, tracking the states
of 100,000s of flows concurrently is often indispensable in production-level
middleboxes deployed at real networks.
We present LightBox, the first system that can drive off-site middleboxes at
near-native speed with stateful processing and the most comprehensive
protection to date. Built upon commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX, LightBox
is the product of our systematic investigation of how to overcome the inherent
limitations of secure enclaves using domain knowledge and customization. First,
we introduce an elegant virtual network interface that allows convenient access
to fully protected packets at line rate without leaving the enclave, as if from
the trusted source network. Second, we provide complete flow state management
for efficient stateful processing, by tailoring a set of data structures and
algorithms optimized for the highly constrained enclave space. Extensive
evaluations demonstrate that LightBox, with all security benefits, can achieve
10Gbps packet I/O, and that with case studies on three stateful middleboxes, it
can operate at near-native speed.Comment: Accepted at ACM CCS 201
The medical science DMZ: a network design pattern for data-intensive medical science
Abstract:
Objective
We describe a detailed solution for maintaining high-capacity, data-intensive network flows (eg, 10, 40, 100 Gbps+) in a scientific, medical context while still adhering to security and privacy laws and regulations.
Materials and Methods
High-end networking, packet-filter firewalls, network intrusion-detection systems.
Results
We describe a “Medical Science DMZ” concept as an option for secure, high-volume transport of large, sensitive datasets between research institutions over national research networks, and give 3 detailed descriptions of implemented Medical Science DMZs.
Discussion
The exponentially increasing amounts of “omics” data, high-quality imaging, and other rapidly growing clinical datasets have resulted in the rise of biomedical research “Big Data.” The storage, analysis, and network resources required to process these data and integrate them into patient diagnoses and treatments have grown to scales that strain the capabilities of academic health centers. Some data are not generated locally and cannot be sustained locally, and shared data repositories such as those provided by the National Library of Medicine, the National Cancer Institute, and international partners such as the European Bioinformatics Institute are rapidly growing. The ability to store and compute using these data must therefore be addressed by a combination of local, national, and industry resources that exchange large datasets. Maintaining data-intensive flows that comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other regulations presents a new challenge for biomedical research. We describe a strategy that marries performance and security by borrowing from and redefining the concept of a Science DMZ, a framework that is used in physical sciences and engineering research to manage high-capacity data flows.
Conclusion
By implementing a Medical Science DMZ architecture, biomedical researchers can leverage the scale provided by high-performance computer and cloud storage facilities and national high-speed research networks while preserving privacy and meeting regulatory requirements
Robustness-Driven Resilience Evaluation of Self-Adaptive Software Systems
An increasingly important requirement for certain classes of software-intensive systems is the ability to self-adapt their structure and behavior at run-time when reacting to changes that may occur to the system, its environment, or its goals. A major challenge related to self-adaptive software systems is the ability to provide assurances of their resilience when facing changes. Since in these systems, the components that act as controllers of a target system incorporate highly complex software, there is the need to analyze the impact that controller failures might have on the services delivered by the system. In this paper, we present a novel approach for evaluating the resilience of self-adaptive software systems by applying robustness testing techniques to the controller to uncover failures that can affect system resilience. The approach for evaluating resilience, which is based on probabilistic model checking, quantifies the probability of satisfaction of system properties when the target system is subject to controller failures. The feasibility of the proposed approach is evaluated in the context of an industrial middleware system used to monitor and manage highly populated networks of devices, which was implemented using the Rainbow framework for architecture-based self-adaptation
Business roles and negotiation models for Web service based provision
The emergence of XML as the lingua franca for communication among applications over the Web, the recent advances in service oriented computing and in web service architectures and the applicability of these technologies in the area of eCommerce necessitates the conceptualisation of business roles and negotiation models for web service based provision. According to the web service paradigm it is envisaged that services will be provided to customers based on dynamic web service composition. This places additional requirements to SLA negotiation in comparison to the traditional service provision paradigm where negotiation for service was performed with a single service provider system. This paper addresses the research challenges with regard to SLA negotiation for web service based provision and outlines business roles and a negotiation model for establishing SLAs with multiple web service providers in order to offer combined web service functionality to match user needs
Directed Security Policies: A Stateful Network Implementation
Large systems are commonly internetworked. A security policy describes the
communication relationship between the networked entities. The security policy
defines rules, for example that A can connect to B, which results in a directed
graph. However, this policy is often implemented in the network, for example by
firewalls, such that A can establish a connection to B and all packets
belonging to established connections are allowed. This stateful implementation
is usually required for the network's functionality, but it introduces the
backflow from B to A, which might contradict the security policy. We derive
compliance criteria for a policy and its stateful implementation. In
particular, we provide a criterion to verify the lack of side effects in linear
time. Algorithms to automatically construct a stateful implementation of
security policy rules are presented, which narrows the gap between
formalization and real-world implementation. The solution scales to large
networks, which is confirmed by a large real-world case study. Its correctness
is guaranteed by the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover.Comment: In Proceedings ESSS 2014, arXiv:1405.055
Control What You Include! Server-Side Protection against Third Party Web Tracking
Third party tracking is the practice by which third parties recognize users
accross different websites as they browse the web. Recent studies show that 90%
of websites contain third party content that is tracking its users across the
web. Website developers often need to include third party content in order to
provide basic functionality. However, when a developer includes a third party
content, she cannot know whether the third party contains tracking mechanisms.
If a website developer wants to protect her users from being tracked, the only
solution is to exclude any third-party content, thus trading functionality for
privacy. We describe and implement a privacy-preserving web architecture that
gives website developers a control over third party tracking: developers are
able to include functionally useful third party content, the same time ensuring
that the end users are not tracked by the third parties
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