Translating proprietary protection setting data into standardized IEC 61850 format for protection setting validation

For smart grid development, one of the key expectations is that the data should be accessible to and readily interpreted by different applications. Presently, protection settings are represented using proprietary parameters and stored in various file formats. This makes it very difficult for computer applications to manipulate such data directly. This paper introduces a process that translates the proprietary protection setting data into IEC 61850 standardised format and saves the data as System Configuration description Language (SCL) files. A code generation process that allows rapid implementation of the translation process is proposed. Among various applications, the paper demonstrates how such a translation process and generated SCL files can facilitate the development of an intelligent system for protection setting error detection and validation

myTrustedCloud: Trusted cloud infrastructure for security-critical computation and data managment

Copyright @ 2012 IEEECloud Computing provides an optimal infrastructure to utilise and share both computational and data resources whilst allowing a pay-per-use model, useful to cost-effectively manage hardware investment or to maximise its utilisation. Cloud Computing also offers transitory access to scalable amounts of computational resources, something that is particularly important due to the time and financial constraints of many user communities. The growing number of communities that are adopting large public cloud resources such as Amazon Web Services [1] or Microsoft Azure [2] proves the success and hence usefulness of the Cloud Computing paradigm. Nonetheless, the typical use cases for public clouds involve non-business critical applications, particularly where issues around security of utilization of applications or deposited data within shared public services are binding requisites. In this paper, a use case is presented illustrating how the integration of Trusted Computing technologies into an available cloud infrastructure - Eucalyptus - allows the security-critical energy industry to exploit the flexibility and potential economical benefits of the Cloud Computing paradigm for their business-critical applications

Are IEEE 1500 compliant cores really compliant to the standard?

Functional verification of complex SoC designs is a challenging task, which fortunately is increasingly supported by automation. This article proposes a verification component for IEEE Std 1500, to be plugged into a commercial verification tool suit

Model Driven Mutation Applied to Adaptative Systems Testing

Dynamically Adaptive Systems modify their behav- ior and structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment and according to an adaptation logic. Critical sys- tems increasingly incorporate dynamic adaptation capabilities; examples include disaster relief and space exploration systems. In this paper, we focus on mutation testing of the adaptation logic. We propose a fault model for adaptation logics that classifies faults into environmental completeness and adaptation correct- ness. Since there are several adaptation logic languages relying on the same underlying concepts, the fault model is expressed independently from specific adaptation languages. Taking benefit from model-driven engineering technology, we express these common concepts in a metamodel and define the operational semantics of mutation operators at this level. Mutation is applied on model elements and model transformations are used to propagate these changes to a given adaptation policy in the chosen formalism. Preliminary results on an adaptive web server highlight the difficulty of killing mutants for adaptive systems, and thus the difficulty of generating efficient tests.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, Mutation Analysis Workshop (Mutation 2011), Berlin : Allemagne (2011

Rehearsal: A Configuration Verification Tool for Puppet

Large-scale data centers and cloud computing have turned system configuration into a challenging problem. Several widely-publicized outages have been blamed not on software bugs, but on configuration bugs. To cope, thousands of organizations use system configuration languages to manage their computing infrastructure. Of these, Puppet is the most widely used with thousands of paying customers and many more open-source users. The heart of Puppet is a domain-specific language that describes the state of a system. Puppet already performs some basic static checks, but they only prevent a narrow range of errors. Furthermore, testing is ineffective because many errors are only triggered under specific machine states that are difficult to predict and reproduce. With several examples, we show that a key problem with Puppet is that configurations can be non-deterministic. This paper presents Rehearsal, a verification tool for Puppet configurations. Rehearsal implements a sound, complete, and scalable determinacy analysis for Puppet. To develop it, we (1) present a formal semantics for Puppet, (2) use several analyses to shrink our models to a tractable size, and (3) frame determinism-checking as decidable formulas for an SMT solver. Rehearsal then leverages the determinacy analysis to check other important properties, such as idempotency. Finally, we apply Rehearsal to several real-world Puppet configurations.Comment: In proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 201

Directed Security Policies: A Stateful Network Implementation

Large systems are commonly internetworked. A security policy describes the communication relationship between the networked entities. The security policy defines rules, for example that A can connect to B, which results in a directed graph. However, this policy is often implemented in the network, for example by firewalls, such that A can establish a connection to B and all packets belonging to established connections are allowed. This stateful implementation is usually required for the network's functionality, but it introduces the backflow from B to A, which might contradict the security policy. We derive compliance criteria for a policy and its stateful implementation. In particular, we provide a criterion to verify the lack of side effects in linear time. Algorithms to automatically construct a stateful implementation of security policy rules are presented, which narrows the gap between formalization and real-world implementation. The solution scales to large networks, which is confirmed by a large real-world case study. Its correctness is guaranteed by the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover.Comment: In Proceedings ESSS 2014, arXiv:1405.055

XML Rewriting Attacks: Existing Solutions and their Limitations

Web Services are web-based applications made available for web users or remote Web-based programs. In order to promote interoperability, they publish their interfaces in the so-called WSDL file and allow remote call over the network. Although Web Services can be used in different ways, the industry standard is the Service Oriented Architecture Web Services that doesn't rely on the implementation details. In this architecture, communication is performed through XML-based messages called SOAP messages. However, those messages are prone to attacks that can lead to code injection, unauthorized accesses, identity theft, etc. This type of attacks, called XML Rewriting Attacks, are all based on unauthorized, yet possible, modifications of SOAP messages. We present in this paper an explanation of this kind of attack, review the existing solutions, and show their limitations. We also propose some ideas to secure SOAP messages, as well as implementation ideas