9,226 research outputs found
Towards an Authorization Framework for App Security Checking
Abstract. Apps don’t come with any guarantees that they are not ma-licious. This paper introduces a PhD project designing the authorization framework used for App Guarden. App Guarden is a new project that uses a flexible assurance framework based on distribution of evidence, attestation and checking algorithms to make explicit why an app isn’t dangerous and to allow users to describe how they want apps on their devices to behave. We use the SecPAL policy language to implement a device policy and give a brief example of a policy being used. Finally we use SecPAL to describe some of the differences between current app markets.
CamFlow: Managed Data-sharing for Cloud Services
A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage
the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this
infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS
applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen
to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and
later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly
it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation
and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require
flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional
cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related
services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to
the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud
services within `Internet of Things' architectures is driving the requirements
for both protection and cross-application data sharing.
These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control
is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement
points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a
crucial issue once data has left its owner's control by cloud-hosted
applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in
addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties
of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing
owners' dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as
safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log
associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide
visibility over data flows. [...]Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure
IoTSan: Fortifying the Safety of IoT Systems
Today's IoT systems include event-driven smart applications (apps) that
interact with sensors and actuators. A problem specific to IoT systems is that
buggy apps, unforeseen bad app interactions, or device/communication failures,
can cause unsafe and dangerous physical states. Detecting flaws that lead to
such states, requires a holistic view of installed apps, component devices,
their configurations, and more importantly, how they interact. In this paper,
we design IoTSan, a novel practical system that uses model checking as a
building block to reveal "interaction-level" flaws by identifying events that
can lead the system to unsafe states. In building IoTSan, we design novel
techniques tailored to IoT systems, to alleviate the state explosion associated
with model checking. IoTSan also automatically translates IoT apps into a
format amenable to model checking. Finally, to understand the root cause of a
detected vulnerability, we design an attribution mechanism to identify
problematic and potentially malicious apps. We evaluate IoTSan on the Samsung
SmartThings platform. From 76 manually configured systems, IoTSan detects 147
vulnerabilities. We also evaluate IoTSan with malicious SmartThings apps from a
previous effort. IoTSan detects the potential safety violations and also
effectively attributes these apps as malicious.Comment: Proc. of the 14th ACM CoNEXT, 201
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