Cyber insurance of information systems: Security and privacy cyber insurance contracts for ICT and helathcare organizations

Nowadays, more-and-more aspects of our daily activities are digitalized. Data and assets in the cyber-space, both for individuals and organizations, must be safeguarded. Thus, the insurance sector must face the challenge of digital transformation in the 5G era with the right set of tools. In this paper, we present CyberSure-an insurance framework for information systems. CyberSure investigates the interplay between certification, risk management, and insurance of cyber processes. It promotes continuous monitoring as the new building block for cyber insurance in order to overcome the current obstacles of identifying in real-time contractual violations by the insured party and receiving early warning notifications prior the violation. Lightweight monitoring modules capture the status of the operating components and send data to the CyberSure backend system which performs the core decision making. Therefore, an insured system is certified dynamically, with the risk and insurance perspectives being evaluated at runtime as the system operation evolves. As new data become available, the risk management and the insurance policies are adjusted and fine-tuned. When an incident occurs, the insurance company possesses adequate information to assess the situation fast, estimate accurately the level of a potential loss, and decrease the required period for compensating the insured customer. The framework is applied in the ICT and healthcare domains, assessing the system of medium-size organizations. GDPR implications are also considered with the overall setting being effective and scalable

Cost-effective enforcement of UCON A policies

In Usage CONtrol (UCON) access decisions rely on mutable attributes. A reference monitor should re-evaluate security policies each time when attributes change their values. Catching timely all attribute changes is a challenging issue, especially if the attribute provider and the reference monitor reside in different security domains. Some attribute changes might be missed, corrupted, and delayed. As a result, the reference monitor may erroneously grant the access to malicious users and forbid it for eligible users. This paper proposes a set of policy enforcement models which help to tolerate uncertainties associated with mutable attributes. In our model the reference monitor as usually evaluates logical predicates over attributes and additionally makes some estimates on how much observed attribute values differ from the real state of the world. The final access decision counts both factors. We assign monetary outcomes for granting and revoking access to legitimate and malicious users and compare the proposed policy enforcement models in terms of cost-efficiency

Security Policy Monitoring of BPMN-based Service Compositions

Service composition is a key concept of Service-Oriented Architecture that allows for combining loosely coupled services that are offered and operated by different service providers. Such environments are expected to dynamically respond to changes that may occur at runtime, including changes in the environment and individual services themselves. Therefore, it is crucial to monitor these loosely-coupled services throughout their lifetime. In this paper, we present a novel framework for monitoring services at runtime and ensuring that services behave as they have promised. In particular, we focus on monitoring non-functional properties that are specified within an agreed security contract. The novelty of our work is based on the way in which monitoring information can be combined from multiple dynamic services to automate the monitoring of business processes and proactively report compliance violations. The framework enables monitoring of both atomic and composite services and provides a user friendly interface for specifying the monitoring policy. We provide an information service case study using a real composite service to demonstrate how we achieve compliance monitoring. The transformation of security policy into monitoring rules, which is done automatically, makes our framework more flexible and accurate than existing techniques

Security policy monitoring of BPMN-based service compositions

Service composition is a key concept of Service- Oriented Architecture that allows for combining loosely coupled services that are offered and operated by different service providers. Such environments are expected to dynamically respond to changes that may occur at runtime, including changes in the environment and individual services themselves. Therefore, it is crucial to monitor these loosely-coupled services throughout their lifetime. In this paper, we present a novel framework for monitoring services at runtime and ensuring that services behave as they have promised. In particular, we focus on monitoring non-functional properties that are specified within an agreed security contract. The novelty of our work is based on the way in which monitoring information can be combined from multiple dynamic services to automate the monitoring of business processes and proactively report compliance violations. The framework enables monitoring of both atomic and composite services and provides a user friendly interface for specifying the monitoring policy. We provide an information service case study using a real composite service to demonstrate how we achieve compliance monitoring. The transformation of security policy into monitoring rules, which is done automatically, makes our framework more flexible and accurate than existing techniques

The Meaning of Logs

While logging events is becoming increasingly common in computing, in communication and in collaborative environments, log systems need to satisfy increasingly challenging (if not conflicting) requirements. In this paper we propose a high-level framework for modeling log systems, and reasoning about them. This framework allows one to give a high-level representation of a log system and to check whether it satisfies given audit and privacy properties which in turn can be expressed in standard logic. In particular, the framework can be used for comparing and assessing log systems. We validate our proposal by formalizing a number of standard log properties and by using it to review a number of existing systems. Despite the growing pervasiveness of log systems, we believe this is the first framework of this sort