Security architecture for law enforcement agencies

In order to carry out their duty to serve and protect, law enforcement agencies (LEAs) must deploy new tools and applications to keep up with the pace of evolving technologies. However, police information and communication technology (ICT) systems have stringent security requirements that may delay the deployment of these new applications, since necessary security measures must be implemented first. This paper presents an integrated security architecture for LEAs that is able to provide common security services to novel and legacy ICT applications, while fulfilling the high security requirements of police forces. By reusing the security services provided by this architecture, new systems do not have to implement custom security mechanisms themselves, and can be easily integrated into existing police ICT infrastructures. The proposed LEA security architecture features state-of-the-art technologies, such as encrypted communications at network and application levels, or multifactor authentication based on certificates stored in smart cards.Web of Science7517107321070

Evaluación del rendimiento de la arquitectura de seguridad INDECT

This paper evaluates the performance of the key elements of the security architecture developed by the INDECT project. In particular it first evaluates three different concurrent error detection mechanism (parity check, Berger code, and cyclic redundancy check) developed in software- and hardware-based implementations of the INDECT block cipher. It also analyses the performance hit in secure web servers when enabling TLS/SSL with mutual authentication. Finally, it evaluates the throughput and delay of traffic in the virtual private network based on the OpenVPN software package with the implemented INDECT block cipher. The results of these evaluations demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms, and by extension the whole INDECT security architecture, are viable and can be used in high-performance Police information and communication systems.Este artículo evalúa el rendimiento de los principales elementos de la arquitectura de seguridad desarrollada por el proyecto INDECT. En particular, en primer lugar evalúa tres mecanismos diferentes de detección concurrente de errores (comprobación de paridad, códigos Berger y verificación por redundancia cíclica) desarrollados en las implementaciones software y hardware del algoritmo de cifrado de bloque INDECT. También se analiza el impacto en el rendimiento de los servidores web seguros cuando se activa TLS/SSL con autenticación mutua. Por último, evalúa el rendimiento y el retardo del tráfico en una red privada virtual, basada en el software OpenVPN con el algoritmo de cifrado INDECT. Los resultados de estas evaluaciones demuestran que los mecanismos propuestos, y el algoritmo de cifrado INDECT, son viables y pueden usarse en sistemas de información y comunicaciones de alto rendimiento para la Policía

Integrated security infrastructures for law enforcement agencies

Published online: 22 June 2013. This paper is an improved version of “Security Infrastructures: Towards the INDECT System Security” from the same authors, presented in the 5th International Conference on Multimedia Communication Services & Security (MCSS 2012), Krakow (Poland), May 31- June 1, 2012.This paper provides an overview of the security architecture for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) designed by the INDECT project, and in particular the security infrastructures that have been deployed so far. These security infrastructures can be organized in the following main areas: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and user management, communications security, and new cryptographic algorithms. This paper presents the new ideas, architectures and deployed testbeds for these areas. In particular, it explains the inner structure of the INDECT PKI employed for federated identity management, the different technologies employed in the VPN testbed, the INDECT Block Cipher (IBC) – a novel cryptographic algorithm that has being integrated into OpenSSL library, and how IBC-enabled TLS/SSL sessions and X.509 certificates are employed to protect INDECT applications. All proposed mechanisms have been designed to work in an integrated fashion as the security foundation of all systems being developed by the INDECT project for LEAs.This work has been funded by the EU Project INDECT (Intelligent information system supporting observation, searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment)—grant agreement number: 218086