Using the XML Key Management Specification (and breaking X.509 rules as you go)

Abstract. Implementing X.509 based public-key infrastructure requires following a complex set of rules to establish if a public key certificate is valid. The XML Key Management Specification has been developed as one way in which the implementation burden can be reduced by moving some of this complexity from clients and onto a server. In this paper we give a brief overview of the XML key management specification standard, and describe how, in addition to the above, this system also provides us with the means to sensibly break many of the rules specified for X.509 based public key infrastructure

Tutorial: Identity Management Systems and Secured Access Control

Identity Management has been a serious problem since the establishment of the Internet. Yet little progress has been made toward an acceptable solution. Early Identity Management Systems (IdMS) were designed to control access to resources and match capabilities with people in well-defined situations, Today’s computing environment involves a variety of user and machine centric forms of digital identities and fuzzy organizational boundaries. With the advent of inter-organizational systems, social networks, e-commerce, m-commerce, service oriented computing, and automated agents, the characteristics of IdMS face a large number of technical and social challenges. The first part of the tutorial describes the history and conceptualization of IdMS, current trends and proposed paradigms, identity lifecycle, implementation challenges and social issues. The second part addresses standards, industry initia-tives, and vendor solutions. We conclude that there is disconnect between the need for a universal, seamless, trans-parent IdMS and current proposed standards and vendor solutions

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security

The National Transport Data Framework

Report by Professor Peter Landshoff (Cambridge University) and Professor John Polak (Imperial College London) on a project for the Department for Transport. emails: [email protected] [email protected] NTDF is designed to be a resource for data owners to deposit descriptions into a central catalogue, so that people can search for data and find data and understand their characteristics. The value of this is to individuals, to commercial organizations, and to public bodies. For example, services that provide better information to travellers will help to make their journey less stressful and persuade them to make more use of public transport. Transport operators need very diverse information to help them plan developments to their services: demographic, geographical, economic etc. And policy makers need a similar range of information to help them decide how to divide their budget and afterwards to evaluate how valuable it has been.This work was supported by the Department for Transport (DfT)

Quantum Resistant Authenticated Key Exchange for OPC UA using Hybrid X.509 Certificates

While the current progress in quantum computing opens new opportunities in a wide range of scientific fields, it poses a serious threat to today?s asymmetric cryptography. New quantum resistant primitives are already available but under active investigation. To avoid the risk of deploying immature schemes we combine them with well-established classical primitives to hybrid schemes, thus hedging our bets. Because quantum resistant primitives have higher resource requirements, the transition to them will affect resource constrained IoT devices in particular. We propose two modifications for the authenticated key establishment process of the industrial machine-to-machine communication protocol OPC UA to make it quantum resistant. Our first variant is based on Kyber for the establishment of shared secrets and uses either Falcon or Dilithium for digital signatures in combination with classical RSA. The second variant is solely based on Kyber in combination with classical RSA. We modify existing opensource software (open62541, mbedTLS) to integrate our two proposed variants and perform various performance measurement

Research and development of accounting system in grid environment

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The Grid has been recognised as the next-generation distributed computing paradigm by seamlessly integrating heterogeneous resources across administrative domains as a single virtual system. There are an increasing number of scientific and business projects that employ Grid computing technologies for large-scale resource sharing and collaborations. Early adoptions of Grid computing technologies have custom middleware implemented to bridge gaps between heterogeneous computing backbones. These custom solutions form the basis to the emerging Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA), which aims at addressing common concerns of Grid systems by defining a set of interoperable and reusable Grid services. One of common concerns as defined in OGSA is the Grid accounting service. The main objective of the Grid accounting service is to ensure resources to be shared within a Grid environment in an accountable manner by metering and logging accurate resource usage information. This thesis discusses the origins and fundamentals of Grid computing and accounting service in the context of OGSA profile. A prototype was developed and evaluated based on OGSA accounting-related standards enabling sharing accounting data in a multi-Grid environment, the World-wide Large Hadron Collider Grid (WLCG). Based on this prototype and lessons learned, a generic middleware solution was also implemented as a toolkit that eases migration of existing accounting system to be standard compatible.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Stanford Universit

Cross-enterprise access control security for electronic health records: Technical, practical and legislation impact

In this thesis we investigate the relationship of security, privacy, legislation, computational power in relation to Cross-Enterprise User Assertions (XUA), which allows us to develop the recommendations for the appropriate, architecture, functionality, cryptographic algorithms, and key lengths. The evolution of health records from paper to electronic media promises to be an important part of improving the quality of health care. The diversity of organizations, systems, geography,laws and regulations create a significant challenge for ensuring the privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), while maintaining availability. XUA is a technology that attempts to address the problem of sharing EHRs across enterprise boundaries. We rely on NSA suite B cryptography to provide the fundamental framework of the minimum security requirements at the 128 bit security level. We also recommend the use of the National Institute of Standards and Technologys (NIST) FIPS 140-2 specification to establish confidence in the software\u27s security features