The patterning of finance/security : a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps

Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps

How to Generate Security Cameras: Towards Defence Generation for Socio-Technical Systems

Recently security researchers have started to look into automated generation of attack trees from socio-technical system models. The obvious next step in this trend of automated risk analysis is automating the selection of security controls to treat the detected threats. However, the existing socio-technical models are too abstract to represent all security controls recommended by practitioners and standards. In this paper we propose an attack-defence model, consisting of a set of attack-defence bundles, to be generated and maintained with the socio-technical model. The attack-defence bundles can be used to synthesise attack-defence trees directly from the model to offer basic attack-defence analysis, but also they can be used to select and maintain the security controls that cannot be handled by the model itself.Comment: GraMSec 2015, 16 page

From FPGA to ASIC: A RISC-V processor experience

This work document a correct design flow using these tools in the Lagarto RISC- V Processor and the RTL design considerations that must be taken into account, to move from a design for FPGA to design for ASIC

Attack-Surface Metrics, OSSTMM and Common Criteria Based Approach to “Composable Security” in Complex Systems

In recent studies on Complex Systems and Systems-of-Systems theory, a huge effort has been put to cope with behavioral problems, i.e. the possibility of controlling a desired overall or end-to-end behavior by acting on the individual elements that constitute the system itself. This problem is particularly important in the “SMART” environments, where the huge number of devices, their significant computational capabilities as well as their tight interconnection produce a complex architecture for which it is difficult to predict (and control) a desired behavior; furthermore, if the scenario is allowed to dynamically evolve through the modification of both topology and subsystems composition, then the control problem becomes a real challenge. In this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to cope with a specific class of control problems in complex systems, the “composability of security functionalities”, recently introduced by the European Funded research through the pSHIELD and nSHIELD projects (ARTEMIS-JU programme). In a nutshell, the objective of this research is to define a control framework that, given a target security level for a specific application scenario, is able to i) discover the system elements, ii) quantify the security level of each element as well as its contribution to the security of the overall system, and iii) compute the control action to be applied on such elements to reach the security target. The main innovations proposed by the authors are: i) the definition of a comprehensive methodology to quantify the security of a generic system independently from the technology and the environment and ii) the integration of the derived metrics into a closed-loop scheme that allows real-time control of the system. The solution described in this work moves from the proof-of-concepts performed in the early phase of the pSHIELD research and enrich es it through an innovative metric with a sound foundation, able to potentially cope with any kind of pplication scenarios (railways, automotive, manufacturing, ...)

Finding and Resolving Security Misusability with Misusability Cases

Although widely used for both security and usability concerns, scenarios used in security design may not necessarily inform the design of usability, and vice- versa. One way of using scenarios to bridge security and usability involves explicitly describing how design deci- sions can lead to users inadvertently exploiting vulnera- bilities to carry out their production tasks. This paper describes how misusability cases, scenarios that describe how design decisions may lead to usability problems sub- sequently leading to system misuse, address this problem. We describe the related work upon which misusability cases are based before presenting the approach, and illus- trating its application using a case study example. Finally, we describe some findings from this approach that further inform the design of usable and secure systems

Governance of Dual-Use Technologies: Theory and Practice

The term dual-use characterizes technologies that can have both military and civilian applications. What is the state of current efforts to control the spread of these powerful technologies—nuclear, biological, cyber—that can simultaneously advance social and economic well-being and also be harnessed for hostile purposes? What have previous efforts to govern, for example, nuclear and biological weapons taught us about the potential for the control of these dual-use technologies? What are the implications for governance when the range of actors who could cause harm with these technologies include not just national governments but also non-state actors like terrorists? These are some of the questions addressed by Governance of Dual-Use Technologies: Theory and Practice, the new publication released today by the Global Nuclear Future Initiative of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The publication's editor is Elisa D. Harris, Senior Research Scholar, Center for International Security Studies, University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. Governance of Dual-Use Technologies examines the similarities and differences between the strategies used for the control of nuclear technologies and those proposed for biotechnology and information technology. The publication makes clear the challenges concomitant with dual-use governance. For example, general agreement exists internationally on the need to restrict access to technologies enabling the development of nuclear weapons. However, no similar consensus exists in the bio and information technology domains. The publication also explores the limitations of military measures like deterrence, defense, and reprisal in preventing globally available biological and information technologies from being misused. Some of the other questions explored by the publication include: What types of governance measures for these dual-use technologies have already been adopted? What objectives have those measures sought to achieve? How have the technical characteristics of the technology affected governance prospects? What have been the primary obstacles to effective governance, and what gaps exist in the current governance regime? Are further governance measures feasible? In addition to a preface from Global Nuclear Future Initiative Co-Director Robert Rosner (University of Chicago) and an introduction and conclusion from Elisa Harris, Governance of Dual-Use Technologiesincludes:On the Regulation of Dual-Use Nuclear Technology by James M. Acton (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)Dual-Use Threats: The Case of Biotechnology by Elisa D. Harris (University of Maryland)Governance of Information Technology and Cyber Weapons by Herbert Lin (Stanford University

Model for cryptography protection of confidential information

УДК 004.056 Борсуковський Ю.В., Борсуковська В.Ю. Модель криптографічного захисту конфіденційної інформації В даній статті проведено детальний аналіз вимог щодо формування моделі криптографічного захисту конфіденційної інформації. Розглянуто використання засобів криптографічного захисту інформації з метою реалізації організаційних та технічних заходів по запобіганню витокам конфіденційної інформації на об’єктах критичної інфраструктури. Сформульовані базові вимоги та рекомендації щодо структури та функціональних складових моделі захисту конфіденційної інформації. Формалізовані вимоги щодо створення, впровадження та експлуатації превентивних процедур управління багатоступінчатим захистом конфіденційної інформації. Наведено приклад використання моделі криптографічного захисту інформації для створення захищеної і прозорої в використанні бази аутентифікаційних даних користувача. Запропонована модель захисту дозволяє мати кілька ступенів програмного та апаратного захисту, що із однієї сторони спрощує їх використання при виконанні чинних політик безпеки і зменшує ймовірність дискредитації аутентифікаційних даних, а із іншої сторони підвищує ймовірність виявлення зловмисних дій третьої сторони за рахунок багатоступінчатої системи захисту. Враховано практичний досвід створення типових моделей захисту конфіденційної інформації для розробки, впровадження та управління сучасними політиками інформаційної безпеки щодо питань використання засобів криптографічного захисту конфіденційної інформації на підприємствах різних форми власності.UDC 004.056 Borsukovskyi Y., Borsukovska V. Model for Cryptography Protection of Confidential Information Current article provides the detailed analysis of requirements for creation of model for cryptography protection of confidential information. Article defines the use of information cryptography protection tools in order to ensure the application of organizational and technical actions to prevent leakage of confidential information at critical infrastructure assets. It provides the basic requirements for the structure and functional elements of model for protection of confidential information. Formalize requirements on creation, implementation and exploitation of preventive procedure in management of multi-level protection of confidential information. The article includes example of use of model for cryptography protection of information for creation of secure and transparent in use the authenticating data base of user. The presented model of protection ensures to have a few levels of firewalls, that, on one hand, simplifies its use in execution of acting security policies and decrease the probability of discrediting of authenticating data, and, on other hand, increase the probability to detect the criminal actions of third party by means of multi-level protection system. It considers the practical experience in creation of standard models for protection of confidential information for development, implementation and management of modern policies on information security in part of use of cryptography protection tools for confidential information at enterprises of different forms of incorporation

Machine Learning Models that Remember Too Much

Machine learning (ML) is becoming a commodity. Numerous ML frameworks and services are available to data holders who are not ML experts but want to train predictive models on their data. It is important that ML models trained on sensitive inputs (e.g., personal images or documents) not leak too much information about the training data. We consider a malicious ML provider who supplies model-training code to the data holder, does not observe the training, but then obtains white- or black-box access to the resulting model. In this setting, we design and implement practical algorithms, some of them very similar to standard ML techniques such as regularization and data augmentation, that "memorize" information about the training dataset in the model yet the model is as accurate and predictive as a conventionally trained model. We then explain how the adversary can extract memorized information from the model. We evaluate our techniques on standard ML tasks for image classification (CIFAR10), face recognition (LFW and FaceScrub), and text analysis (20 Newsgroups and IMDB). In all cases, we show how our algorithms create models that have high predictive power yet allow accurate extraction of subsets of their training data