XML Security in Certificate Management - XML Certificator

The trend of rapid growing use of XML format in data/document management system reveals that security measures should be urgently considered into next generation's data/document systems. This paper presents a new certificate management system developed on the basis of XML security mechanisms. The system is supported by the theories of XML security as well as Object oriented technology and database. Finally it has been successfully implemented in using C&#, SQL, XML signature and XML encryption. An implementation metrics is evidently presented

Analysis of PKI as a Means of Securing ODF Documents

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has for the last two decades been a means of securing systems and communication. With the adoption of Open Document Format (ODF) as an ISO standard, the question remains if the unpopular, expensive, complex and unmaintainable PKI can prove to be a viable means of securing ODF documents. This paper analyses the drawbacks of PKI and evaluates the useji.tlness of PKl in provisioning robust, cheap and maintainable XML security to XML based ODF. This paper also evaluates the existing research on XML security, more specifically fine grained access control

Developing a Framework to Implement Public Key Infrastructure Enabled Security in XML Documents

This paper concentrates on proposing a framework to implement the PKI enables security in XML documents, by defining a common framework and processing rules that can be shared across applications using common tools, avoiding the need for extensive customization of applications to add security. The Framework reuses the concepts, algorithms and core technologies of legacy security systems while introducing changes necessary to support extensible integration with XML. This allows interoperability with a wide range of existing infrastructures and across deployments. Currently no strict security models and mechanisms are available that can provide specification and enforcement of security policies for XML documents. Such models are crucial in order to facilitate a secure dissemination of XML documents, containing information of different sensitivity levels, among (possibly large) user communities

Directions for Web and E-Commerce Applications Security

This paper provides directions for web and e-commerce applications security. In particular, access control policies, workflow security, XML security and federated database security issues pertaining to the web and ecommerce applications are discussed

Secure Querying of Recursive XML Views: A Standard XPath-based Technique

Most state-of-the art approaches for securing XML documents allow users to access data only through authorized views defined by annotating an XML grammar (e.g. DTD) with a collection of XPath expressions. To prevent improper disclosure of confidential information, user queries posed on these views need to be rewritten into equivalent queries on the underlying documents. This rewriting enables us to avoid the overhead of view materialization and maintenance. A major concern here is that query rewriting for recursive XML views is still an open problem. To overcome this problem, some works have been proposed to translate XPath queries into non-standard ones, called Regular XPath queries. However, query rewriting under Regular XPath can be of exponential size as it relies on automaton model. Most importantly, Regular XPath remains a theoretical achievement. Indeed, it is not commonly used in practice as translation and evaluation tools are not available. In this paper, we show that query rewriting is always possible for recursive XML views using only the expressive power of the standard XPath. We investigate the extension of the downward class of XPath, composed only by child and descendant axes, with some axes and operators and we propose a general approach to rewrite queries under recursive XML views. Unlike Regular XPath-based works, we provide a rewriting algorithm which processes the query only over the annotated DTD grammar and which can run in linear time in the size of the query. An experimental evaluation demonstrates that our algorithm is efficient and scales well.Comment: (2011

SMOQE: A System for Providing Secure Access to XML

XML views have been widely used to enforce access control, support data integration, and speed up query answering. In many applications, e.g., XML security enforcement, it is prohibitively expensive to materialize and maintain a large number of views. Therefore, views are necessarily virtual. An immediate question then is how to answer queries on XML virtual views. A common approach is to rewrite a query on the view to an equivalent one on the underlying document, and evaluate the rewritten query. This is the approach used in the Secure MOdular Query Engine (SMOQE). The demo presents SMOQE, the first system to provide efficient support for answering queries over virtual and possibly recursively defined XML views. We demonstrate a set of novel techniques for the specification of views, the rewriting, evaluation and optimization of XML queries. Moreover, we provide insights into the internals of the engine by a set of visual tools. 1

Intelligent XML Tag Classification Techniques for XML Encryption Improvement

Flexibility, friendliness, and adaptability have been key components to use XML to exchange information across different networks providing the needed common syntax for various messaging systems. However excess usage of XML as a communication medium shed the light on security standards used to protect exchanged messages achieving data confidentiality and privacy. This research presents a novel approach to secure XML messages being used in various systems with efficiency providing high security measures and high performance. system model is based on two major modules, the first to classify XML messages and define which parts of the messages to be secured assigning an importance level for each tag presented in XML message and then using XML encryption standard proposed earlier by W3C [3] to perform a partial encryption on selected parts defined in classification stage. As a result, study aims to improve both the performance of XML encryption process and bulk message handling to achieve data cleansing efficiently

A General Approach for Securely Querying and Updating XML Data

Over the past years several works have proposed access control models for XML data where only read-access rights over non-recursive DTDs are considered. A few amount of works have studied the access rights for updates. In this paper, we present a general model for specifying access control on XML data in the presence of update operations of W3C XQuery Update Facility. Our approach for enforcing such updates specifications is based on the notion of query rewriting where each update operation defined over arbitrary DTD (recursive or not) is rewritten to a safe one in order to be evaluated only over XML data which can be updated by the user. We investigate in the second part of this report the secure of XML updating in the presence of read-access rights specified by a security views. For an XML document, a security view represents for each class of users all and only the parts of the document these users are able to see. We show that an update operation defined over a security view can cause disclosure of sensitive data hidden by this view if it is not thoroughly rewritten with respect to both read and update access rights. Finally, we propose a security view based approach for securely updating XML in order to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of XML data.Comment: No. RR-7870 (2012

XML data integrity based on concatenated hash function

Data integrity is the fundamental for data authentication. A major problem for XML data authentication is that signed XML data can be copied to another document but still keep signature valid. This is caused by XML data integrity protecting. Through investigation, the paper discovered that besides data content integrity, XML data integrity should also protect element location information, and context referential integrity under fine-grained security situation. The aim of this paper is to propose a model for XML data integrity considering XML data features. The paper presents an XML data integrity model named as CSR (content integrity, structure integrity, context referential integrity) based on a concatenated hash function. XML data content integrity is ensured using an iterative hash process, structure integrity is protected by hashing an absolute path string from root node, and context referential integrity is ensured by protecting context-related elements. Presented XML data integrity model can satisfy integrity requirements under situation of fine-grained security, and compatible with XML signature. Through evaluation, the integrity model presented has a higher efficiency on digest value-generation than the Merkle hash tree-based integrity model for XML data

DTD level authorization in XML documents with usage control

[Summary]: In recent years an increasing amount of semi-structured data has become important to humans and programs. XML promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is rapidly emerging as the new standard language for semi-structured data representation and exchange on the Internet. XML documents may contain private information that cannot be shared by all user communities. So securing XML data is becoming increasingly important and several approaches have been designed to protect information in a website. However, these approaches typically are used at file system level, rather than for the data in XML documents. Usage control has been considered as the next generation access control model with distinguishing properties of decision continuity. Usage control enables finer-grained control over usage of digital objects than that of traditional access control policies and models. In this paper, we present a usage control model to protect information distributed on the web, which allows the access restrictions directly at DTD-level and XML document-level. Finally, comparisons with related works are analysed