3PAC: Enforcing Access Policies for Web Services

Web services fail to deliver on the promise of ubiquitous deployment and seamless interoperability due to the lack of a uniform, standards-based approach to all aspects of security. In particular, the enforcement of access policies in a service oriented architecture is not addressed adequately. We present a novel approach to the distribution and enforcement of credentials-based access policies for Web services (3PAC) which scales well and can be implemented in existing deployments

State of Alaska Election Security Project Phase 2 Report

A laska’s election system is among the most secure in the country, and it has a number of safeguards other states are now adopting. But the technology Alaska uses to record and count votes could be improved— and the state’s huge size, limited road system, and scattered communities also create special challenges for insuring the integrity of the vote. In this second phase of an ongoing study of Alaska’s election security, we recommend ways of strengthening the system—not only the technology but also the election procedures. The lieutenant governor and the Division of Elections asked the University of Alaska Anchorage to do this evaluation, which began in September 2007.Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell. State of Alaska Division of Elections.List of Appendices / Glossary / Study Team / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Summary of Recommendations / Part 1 Defense in Depth / Part 2 Fortification of Systems / Part 3 Confidence in Outcomes / Conclusions / Proposed Statement of Work for Phase 3: Implementation / Reference

Design of an embedded iris recognition system for use with a multi-factor authentication system.

This paper describes in detail the design, manufacturing and testing of an embedded iris scanner for use with a multifactor authentication system. The design process for this project included hardware design from part selection to board design to populating. Additionally, this process included the entirety of the software development, though the iris recognition process was largely based on other works. The functional requirements for the overall multi-factor authentication system were to have three authentication methods with a thirty second window to complete all three. The system acceptance accuracy was required to be greater than 75%. Those requirements therefore dictate that the iris scanner module must also have an acceptance accuracy higher than 75% and perform iris recognition in a few seconds so that the user can gain admittance in the allotted window of time. While the hardware has been verified and tested, further development and testing is necessary on the software and image processing. This work is funded by the Department of Energy’s Kansas City National Security Campus, operated by Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, LLC under contract number DE-NA0002839

Specification and analysis of SOC systems using COWS: a finance case study

Service-oriented computing, an emerging paradigm for distributed computing based on the use of services, is calling for the development of tools and techniques to build safe and trustworthy systems, and to analyse their behaviour. Therefore many researchers have proposed to use process calculi, a cornerstone of current foundational research on specification and analysis of concurrent and distributed systems. We illustrate this approach by focussing on COWS, a process calculus expressly designed for specifying and combining services, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. We present the calculus and one of the analysis techniques it enables, that is based on the temporal logic SocL and the associated model checker CMC. We demonstrate applicability of our tools by means of a large case study, from the financial domain, which is first specified in COWS, and then analysed by using SocL to express many significant properties and CMC to verify them

A schema for cryptographic keys generation using hybrid biometrics

Biometric identifiers refer to unique physical properties or behavioural attributes of individuals. Some of the well known biometric identifiers are voice, finger prints, retina or iris, facial structure etc. In our daily interaction with others directly or indirectly, we implicitly use biometrics to know, distinguish and trust people. Biometric identifiers represent the concept of "who a person is" by gathering vital characteristics that don't correspond to any other person. The human brain to some extent is able to ascertain disparities or variation in certain physical attributes and yet verify the authenticity of a person. But this is difficult to be implemented in electronic systems due to the intense requirements of artificial decision making and hard-coded logic. This paper examines the possibility of using a combination of biometric attributes to overcome common problems in having a single biometric scheme for authentication. It also investigates possible schemes and features to deal with variations in Biometric attributes. The material presented is related to ongoing research by the Computer Communications Research Group at Leeds Metropolitan University. We use this paper as a starting step and as a plan for advanced research. It offers ideas and proposition for implementing hybrid biometrics in conjunction with cryptography. This is work in progress and is in a very preliminary stage

Towards Formal Interaction-Based Models of Grid Computing Infrastructures

Grid computing (GC) systems are large-scale virtual machines, built upon a massive pool of resources (processing time, storage, software) that often span multiple distributed domains. Concurrent users interact with the grid by adding new tasks; the grid is expected to assign resources to tasks in a fair, trustworthy way. These distinctive features of GC systems make their specification and verification a challenging issue. Although prior works have proposed formal approaches to the specification of GC systems, a precise account of the interaction model which underlies resource sharing has not been yet proposed. In this paper, we describe ongoing work aimed at filling in this gap. Our approach relies on (higher-order) process calculi: these core languages for concurrency offer a compositional framework in which GC systems can be precisely described and potentially reasoned about.Comment: In Proceedings DCM 2013, arXiv:1403.768