Strong Electronic Identification: Survey & Scenario Planning

The deployment of more high-risk services such as online banking and government services on the Internet has meant that the need and demand for strong electronic identity is bigger today more than ever. Different stakeholders have different reasons for moving their services to the Internet, including cost savings, being closer to the customer or citizen, increasing volume and value of services among others. This means that traditional online identification schemes based on self-asserted identities are no longer sufficient to cope with the required level of assurance demanded by these services. Therefore, strong electronic identification methods that utilize identifiers rooted in real world identities must be provided to be used by customers and citizens alike on the Internet. This thesis focuses on studying state-of-the-art methods for providing reliable and mass market strong electronic identity in the world today. It looks at concrete real-world examples that enable real world identities to be transferred and used in the virtual world of the Internet. The thesis identifies crucial factors that determine what constitutes a strong electronic identity solution and through these factors evaluates and compares the example solutions surveyed in the thesis. As the Internet become more pervasive in our lives; mobile devices are becoming the primary devices for communication and accessing Internet services. This has thus, raised the question of what sort of strong electronic identity solutions could be implemented and how such solutions could adapt to the future. To help to understand the possible alternate futures, a scenario planning and analysis method was used to develop a series of scenarios from underlying key economic, political, technological and social trends and uncertainties. The resulting three future scenarios indicate how the future of strong electronic identity will shape up with the aim of helping stakeholders contemplate the future and develop policies and strategies to better position themselves for the future

Incident Handling and Response Process in Security Operations

In today's digital age, ensuring the security of an organization's information and assets is critical to its success. Information security incidents are becoming more diverse, damaging, and disruptive, leaving organizations with a massive task on their hands to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their systems, proprietary and confidential data. A breach of which could be highly detrimental to the organization. Therefore, to protect the organization, it is crucial to have an effective security operations program, which in addition to protecting the organization against security threats require the development and implementation of a process which allows the organization to respond to security incidents quickly and effectively. The objective of this Thesis is to develop a practical process for security incident handling and response that could help the case company detect, analyze, contain, eradicate, and recover from security incidents, minimizing their impact and preventing future incidents. It employs a constructive research approach in achieving the objective, leveraging a collaborative development approach to involve stakeholders across the organization. The data was gathered through literature review, observations, and group discussions with stakeholders from the case organization. The Thesis draws on existing standards and literature on information security incident management, such as NIST 800-61: Computer Security Incident Handling Guide, and ISO/IEC 27035: Information technology — Information security incident management series, to form the theoretical framework of the Thesis. The security incident handling and response process which is the outcome of this Thesis fits the need of the case company. The process was developed through a series of cycles of data collection, analysis, and evaluation, which allowed for the incorporation of feedback from stakeholders and the identification of areas that required improvement. This iterative process ensured that the process is continually refined and improved to ensure its effectiveness to meet the needs of the case company. The process establishes guidelines for handling security incidents including reporting, triaging and responding to incidents, roles, and responsibilities of stakeholders during incident response, communication and escalation procedures, and follow-up actions. The implementation of the process enables the case company to be sufficiently prepared to respond to security incidents, ensuring that its security operations program is relevant and effective in today's rapidly evolving threat landscape