EPICS: A Framework for Enforcing Security Policies in Composite Web Services

With advances in cloud computing and the emergence of service marketplaces, the popularity of composite services marks a paradigm shift from single-domain monolithic systems to cross-domain distributed services, which raises important privacy and security concerns. Access control becomes a challenge in such systems because authentication, authorization and data disclosure may take place across endpoints that are not known to clients. The clients lack options for specifying policies to control the sharing of their data and have to rely on service providers which provide limited selection of security and privacy preferences. This lack of awareness and loss of control over data sharing increases threats to a client\u27s data and diminishes trust in these systems

Développement d'un système de gestion de workflows distribué

Les nouvelles générations de systèmes d'information intègrent les systèmes d'applications aux systèmes de gestion de workflows. La modélisation de procédures d'affaires ou de workflows est un domaine récent.Les chercheurs dans ce domaine visent à développer des méta-modèles de workflows, à intégrer différentes implémentations de workflows et à augmenter la flexibilité des systèmes de gestion de workflows. Le travail de recherche présenté dans ce mémoire porte sur le développement d'un système de gestion de workflows distribué. Dans ce travail, nous appliquons une méthode orientée objets (OMT) pour l'analyse et la conception d'un tel système. Puis, nous construisons le système suivant une architecture client/serveur à base d'objets distribués. En plus, nous réalisons un client workflows et un serveur workflows. Ces deux modules sont développés avec le langage de programmation Java. La communication entre les objets distants est gérée par le bus RMI. La base de données est construite à l'aide du SGBD d'Oracle et les accès aux données sont réalisés en utilisant JDBC

Secure Data Communication in Autonomous V2X Systems

In Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication systems, vehicles as well as infrastructure devices can interact and exchange data with each other. This capability is used to implement intelligent transportation systems applications. Data confidentiality and integrity need to be preserved in unverified and untrusted environments. In this paper, we propose a solution that provides (a) role-based and attribute-based access control to encrypted data and (b) encrypted search over encrypted data. Vehicle Records contain sensitive information about the owners and vehicles in encrypted form with attached access control policies and policy enforcement engine. Our solution supports decentralized and distributed data exchange, which is essential in V2X systems, where a Central Authority is not required to enforce access control policies. Furthermore, we facilitate querying encrypted Vehicle Records through Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. Vehicle Records are stored in a database in untrusted V2X cloud environment that is prone to provide the attackers with a large attack surface. Big datasets, stored in cloud, can be used for data analysis, such as traffic pattern analysis. Our solution protects sensitive vehicle and owner information from curious or malicious information cloud administrators. Support of indexing improves performance of queries that are forwarded to relevant encrypted Vehicle Records, which are stored in the cloud. We measure the performance overhead of our security solution based on self-protecting Vehicle Records with encrypted search capabilities in V2X communication systems and analyze the effect of security over safety

Mindset for Software Architecture Students

Software architecture students need to believe that they can change their abilities in order to become proficient with software architecture design. Addressing students’ beliefs about their capabilities introduces the realm of mindset. This paper reports about a survey that we conducted in a large university to study a set of factors associated with the students’ mindset. The study found that the students’ mindsets weakly correlates with their cognitive levels and are associated with their expectations from the course. In addition, it found that the students who prefer practicing software architecture have more open mindset than the ones who prefer quizzes. The findings provide new knowledge about the connections between the mindsets of the students, their perception of software architecture, and their approach to learning software architecture practices. The results could be used to design intervention strategies to improve the ability of the students to learn software architecture

Demo: A Low-Cost Fleet Monitoring System

Organizations use fleet monitoring systems for e.g., vehicle tracking, driver behavior analysis, and efficient fleet management. Current systems are designed for commercial use and are of high cost. We present a prototype of a low-cost fleet monitoring system that could be used for non-commercial applications. The system is composed of a device, a service application, and a Web application. The device reads data such as speed and fuel from the internal network of the connected vehicle and the location of the vehicle and sends them to a remote service. The remote service processes and stores the data. The users use a Web application to view the data about their vehicles in real-time

Identification of the Impacts of Code Changes on the Security of Software

Companies develop their software in versions and iterations. Ensuring the security of each additional version using code review is costly and time consuming. This paper investigates automated tracing of the impacts of code changes on the security of a given software. To this end, we use call graphs to model the software code, and security assurance cases to model the security requirements of the software. Then we relate assurance case elements to code through the entry point methods of the software, creating a map of monitored security functions. This mapping allows to evaluate the security requirements that are affected by code changes. The approach is implemented in a set of tools and evaluated using three open-source ERP/E-commerce software applications. The limited evaluation showed that the approach is effective in identifying the impacts of code changes on the security of the software. The approach promises to considerably reduce the security assessment time of the subsequent releases and iterations of software, keeping the initial security state throughout the software lifetime

Threat Modeling of Cyber-Physical Systems in Practice

Traditional Cyber-physical Systems(CPSs) were not built with cybersecurity in mind. They operated on separate Operational Technology (OT) networks. As these systems now become more integrated with Information Technology (IT) networks based on IP, they expose vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the attackers through these IT networks. The attackers can control such systems and cause behavior that jeopardizes the performance and safety measures that were originally designed into the system. In this paper, we explore the approaches to identify threats to CPSs and ensure the quality of the created threat models. The study involves interviews with eleven security experts working in security consultation companies, software engineering companies, an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM),and ground and areal vehicles integrators. We found through these interviews that the practitioners use a combination of various threat modeling methods, approaches, and standards together when they perform threat modeling of given CPSs. key challenges practitioners face are: they cannot transfer the threat modeling knowledge that they acquire in a cyber-physical domain to other domains, threat models of modified systems are often not updated, and the reliance on mostly peer-evaluation and quality checklists to ensure the quality of threat models. The study warns about the difficulty to develop secure CPSs and calls for research on developing practical threat modeling methods for CPSs, techniques for continuous threat modeling, and techniques to ensure the quality of threat models

EPICS: A Framework for Enforcing Security Policies in Composite Web Services

With advances in cloud computing and the emergence of service marketplaces, the popularity of composite services marks a paradigm shift from single-domain monolithic systems to cross-domain distributed services, which raises important privacy and security concerns. Access control becomes a challenge in such systems because authentication, authorization and data disclosure may take place across endpoints that are not known to clients. The clients lack options for specifying policies to control the sharing of their data and have to rely on service providers which offer limited selection of security and privacy preferences. This lack of awareness and loss of control over data sharing increases threats to a client's data and diminishes trust in these systems. We propose EPICS, an efficient and effective solution for enforcing security policies in composite Web services that protects data privacy throughout the service interaction lifecycle. The solution ensures that the data are distributed along with the client policies that dictate data access and an execution monitor that controls data disclosure. It empowers data owners with control of data disclosure decisions during interactions with remote services and reduces the risk of unauthorized access. The paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the EPICS framework