16,574 research outputs found
Authentication and authorisation in entrusted unions
This paper reports on the status of a project whose aim is to implement and demonstrate in a real-life environment an integrated eAuthentication and eAuthorisation framework to enable trusted collaborations and delivery of services across different organisational/governmental jurisdictions. This aim will be achieved by designing a framework with assurance of claims, trust indicators, policy enforcement mechanisms and processing under encryption to address the security and confidentiality requirements of large distributed infrastructures. The framework supports collaborative secure distributed storage, secure data processing and management in both the cloud and offline scenarios and is intended to be deployed and tested in two pilot studies in two different domains, viz, Bio-security incident management and Ambient Assisted Living (eHealth). Interim results in terms of security requirements, privacy preserving authentication, and authorisation are reported
Data Minimisation in Communication Protocols: A Formal Analysis Framework and Application to Identity Management
With the growing amount of personal information exchanged over the Internet,
privacy is becoming more and more a concern for users. One of the key
principles in protecting privacy is data minimisation. This principle requires
that only the minimum amount of information necessary to accomplish a certain
goal is collected and processed. "Privacy-enhancing" communication protocols
have been proposed to guarantee data minimisation in a wide range of
applications. However, currently there is no satisfactory way to assess and
compare the privacy they offer in a precise way: existing analyses are either
too informal and high-level, or specific for one particular system. In this
work, we propose a general formal framework to analyse and compare
communication protocols with respect to privacy by data minimisation. Privacy
requirements are formalised independent of a particular protocol in terms of
the knowledge of (coalitions of) actors in a three-layer model of personal
information. These requirements are then verified automatically for particular
protocols by computing this knowledge from a description of their
communication. We validate our framework in an identity management (IdM) case
study. As IdM systems are used more and more to satisfy the increasing need for
reliable on-line identification and authentication, privacy is becoming an
increasingly critical issue. We use our framework to analyse and compare four
identity management systems. Finally, we discuss the completeness and
(re)usability of the proposed framework
ZETA - Zero-Trust Authentication: Relying on Innate Human Ability, not Technology
Reliable authentication requires the devices and
channels involved in the process to be trustworthy; otherwise
authentication secrets can easily be compromised. Given the
unceasing efforts of attackers worldwide such trustworthiness
is increasingly not a given. A variety of technical solutions,
such as utilising multiple devices/channels and verification
protocols, has the potential to mitigate the threat of untrusted
communications to a certain extent. Yet such technical solutions
make two assumptions: (1) users have access to multiple
devices and (2) attackers will not resort to hacking the human,
using social engineering techniques. In this paper, we propose
and explore the potential of using human-based computation
instead of solely technical solutions to mitigate the threat of
untrusted devices and channels. ZeTA (Zero Trust Authentication
on untrusted channels) has the potential to allow people to
authenticate despite compromised channels or communications
and easily observed usage. Our contributions are threefold:
(1) We propose the ZeTA protocol with a formal definition
and security analysis that utilises semantics and human-based
computation to ameliorate the problem of untrusted devices
and channels. (2) We outline a security analysis to assess
the envisaged performance of the proposed authentication
protocol. (3) We report on a usability study that explores the
viability of relying on human computation in this context
Verifying service continuity in a satellite reconfiguration procedure: application to a satellite
The paper discusses the use of the TURTLE UML profile to model and verify service continuity during dynamic reconfiguration of embedded software, and space-based telecommunication software in particular. TURTLE extends UML class diagrams with composition operators, and activity diagrams with temporal operators. Translating TURTLE to the formal description technique RT-LOTOS gives the profile a formal semantics and makes it possible to reuse verification techniques implemented by the RTL, the RT-LOTOS toolkit developed at LAAS-CNRS. The paper proposes a modeling and formal validation methodology based on TURTLE and RTL, and discusses its application to a payload software application in charge of an embedded packet switch. The paper demonstrates the benefits of using TURTLE to prove service continuity for dynamic reconfiguration of embedded software
Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems
Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to
unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to
safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as
unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system.
This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about
MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be
backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on
testing and simulation.
We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step
towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of
an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify
both the specification of these systems and the verification of their
properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and
their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and
implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare
effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of
expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin
Operator authentication and accountability for SCADA servers when requests are forwarded by a middle layer
Due to their critical nature, the actions performed by operators on Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are subject to source authentication and accountability. When commands are not send directly by the user, but forwarded by middle servers, the compromise of those severs threatens the security of the whole architecture. This Master thesis provides a solution for that problem, guaranteeing authentication end-to-end while fulfilling cost and performance requirements. Based on an analysis of several potential solutions, digital signatures were assessed to be the most flexible and secure option. Moreover, the proposed solution relies on Microsoft's Active Directory, which manages credentials on the target architecture, for securely linking public keys with user identities. A prototype implementation of the proposed design is included, together with a limited performance evaluation. They have proven the validity of the design, that guarantees end-to-end authentication and accountability of command requests, while maintaining low implementation and maintenance costs and a negligible impact in latency per message
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