Attribute-Based, Usefully Secure Email

A secure system that cannot be used by real users to secure real-world processes is not really secure at all. While many believe that usability and security are diametrically opposed, a growing body of research from the field of Human-Computer Interaction and Security (HCISEC) refutes this assumption. All researchers in this field agree that focusing on aligning usability and security goals can enable the design of systems that will be more secure under actual usage. We bring to bear tools from the social sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, etc.) not only to help us better understand why deployed systems fail, but also to enable us to accurately characterize the problems that we must solve in order to build systems that will be secure in the real world. Trust, a critically important facet of any socio-technical secure system, is ripe for analysis using the tools provided for us by the social sciences. There are a variety of scopes in which issues of trust in secure systems can be stud- ied. We have chosen to focus on how humans decide to trust new correspondents. Current secure email systems such as S/MIME and PGP/MIME are not expressive enough to capture the real ways that trust flows in these sorts of scenarios. To solve this problem, we begin by applying concepts from social science research to a variety of such cases from interesting application domains; primarily, crisis management in the North American power grid. We have examined transcripts of telephone calls made between grid manage- ment personnel during the August 2003 North American blackout and extracted several different classes of trust flows from these real-world scenarios. Combining this knowl- edge with some design patterns from HCISEC, we develop criteria for a system that will enable humans apply these same methods of trust-building in the digital world. We then present Attribute-Based, Usefully Secure Email (ABUSE) and not only show that it meets our criteria, but also provide empirical evidence that real users are helped by the system

Trust Infrastructure for Policy based Messaging In Open Environments

Policy-based messaging (PBM) aims at carrying security policies with messages, which will be enforced at recipient systems to provide security features. PBM promotes a distributed mechanism for secure messaging. The openness of computing environments challenges the PBM model due to the varying trust relations between the different systems and their different behaviour. This paper present a design of a trust infrastructure which is developed based on a public key infrastructure. The trust infrastructure publishes policy enforcement information about the messaging systems, and engenders trust through consistent and mandatory policy enforcement by the systems. It incorporates policy-based management mechanisms to provide flexible and customised messaging services. Secure messaging is achieved by defining security related policies and confining messaging systems' behaviour to defined security constraints. The process of PBM is also described, including publishing certificates, sending messages, accessing messages, and enforcing policies

Un nouveau modèle de correspondance pour un service de messagerie électronique avancée

The ease of use and efficiency of the email service contributed to its widespread adoption. It became an essential service and authorizing multiples and various uses (private, professional, administrative, governmental, military ...). However, all existing systems are technically reduced to the implementation of global policies, compiling in a static way a limited set of features. These approaches prevent differentiated adaptations of the system to the uses. The rigid and monolithic nature of these policies can moreover lead to unnecessary execution of expensive treatments or to the inability to simultaneously satisfy conflicting requirements. We address this problem of the evolution of e-mail in the general context of interpersonal communication of a sender to a receiver. We identify the sender's intention of communication, as a key parameter of any interpersonal communication, insofar as it allows to finely discriminate the successful communications, between all the ones that are understood. A second parameter which is orthogonal to the first, defined as the context of the sender, is important because it allows to determine the successful aspect of an interpersonal communication. The declination of these two parameters in the electronic mail led us to define the concept of electronic correspondence. This one is a generalization of the email the implementation of which provides a sufficient condition of qualification successful exchanges via this medium. A correspondence allows taking into account for each message, the intention of communication and context of its sender. Its implementation requires in certain points of the network, the enforcement of specific policies depending of an administrative domain and which take as argument the intention of communication and the current context of the sender. A second benefit provided by this concept concerns the level of customization of messaging reaching a maximum granularity, because it can be applied in a differentiated way, to each message instance. These works led to the description of a representative architecture and the definition of three extensions to existing standards (SUBMISSION, IMF and S/MIME). Our approach has been illustrated through two main use cases, compliant with recommended specifications for administration (RGS - Référentiel Général de Sécurité) and military (MMHS - Military Message Handling System) domains.Le service de courrier électronique en raison de sa simplicité d'utilisation combinée à son efficacité, a constitué l'un des principaux vecteurs de popularisation d'Internet. Il est devenu un service incontournable dont la richesse s'exprime au travers des usages variés et multiples qu'il autorise (privé, professionnel, administratif, officiel, militaire...). Cependant, toutes les réalisations existantes se réduisent techniquement à la mise en oeuvre de politiques globales, compilant de façon statique un ensemble limité de fonctionnalités. Ces approches ne permettent pas au système de s'adapter de façon différenciée aux usages. De plus, le caractère rigide et monolithique de ces politiques peut parfois conduire à l'exécution inutile de traitements coûteux ou à l'impossibilité de satisfaire simultanément des exigences contradictoires. Nous abordons cette problématique de l'évolution de la messagerie électronique dans le cadre général de la communication interpersonnelle d'un locuteur vers un interlocuteur. Nous identifions l'intention de communication du locuteur, comme un paramètre clé de toute communication interpersonnelle, dans la mesure où il permet de discriminer finement les communications réussies, parmi toutes celles qui sont comprises. Un second paramètre orthogonal au premier, défini comme le contexte du locuteur, s'avère déterminant lorsqu'il s'agit d'aborder la réalisation concrète des communications interpersonnelles réussies. La déclinaison de ces deux paramètres dans le cadre de la messagerie électronique nous conduit à concevoir la notion de correspondance. Cette dernière constitue une généralisation du courrier électronique dont la mise en oeuvre offre une condition suffisante de qualification des échanges réussis, via ce média. Une correspondance permet de prendre en compte pour chaque message, l'intention de communication et le contexte de son émetteur. Sa mise en oeuvre impose l'application en certains points du réseau, de politiques spécifiques au domaine administratif de référence, qui prennent en argument l'intention de communication et le contexte courant de l'émetteur. Un second bénéfice apporté par ce concept concerne le niveau de personnalisation du service de messagerie qui atteint une granularité de finesse maximale, du fait qu'il peut s'appliquer de façon différenciée, à chaque occurrence de message. Ces travaux ont abouti à la description d'une architecture représentative accompagnée de la définition de trois extensions de standards existants (SUBMISSION, IMF et S/MIME). Notre approche a été illustrée à travers deux cas d'usages importants, conformes à des spécifications recommandées pour les domaines administratif (RGS- référentiel général de sécurité) et militaire (MMHS - Military Message Handling System)