Luigi Catuogno, Roberto Gassirà, Michele Masullo, Ivan Visconti
{"title":"SmartK: Smart cards in operating systems at kernel level","authors":"Luigi Catuogno, Roberto Gassirà, Michele Masullo, Ivan Visconti","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A smart card is a tamper-resistant miniature computer that performs some basic computations on input a secret information. So far, smart cards have been widely used for securing many digital transactions (e.g., pay television, ATM machines).</p><p>We focus on the implementation of operating system security services leveraging on smart cards. This very challenging feature allows one to personalize some functionalities of the operating system by simply changing a smart card. Current solutions for integrating smart card features in operating system services require at least a partial execution of some of the operating system functionalities at “user level”. Unfortunately, system functionalities built on top of components lying at both kernel and user levels may negatively affect the overall system security, due to the introduction of multiple points of failure.</p><p>In this work, we present the design and implementation of SmartK: a framework that integrates features of smart cards uniquely in the Linux kernel. In order to validate our approach, we propose a host of enhancements to the Linux operating system built on top of SmartK: 1) in-kernel clients' authentication with Kerberos; 2) execution of trusted code; 3) key management in secure network filesystems.</p><p>In particular, we present an experimental Linux OS distribution (SalSA), which addresses the security issues related to downloading packages and to updating an operating system through the Internet.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 3","pages":"Pages 93-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126036304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nikolaos E. Petroulakis , Elias Z. Tragos , Alexandros G. Fragkiadakis , George Spanoudakis
{"title":"A lightweight framework for secure life-logging in smart environments","authors":"Nikolaos E. Petroulakis , Elias Z. Tragos , Alexandros G. Fragkiadakis , George Spanoudakis","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>As the world becomes an interconnected network where objects and humans interact with each other, new challenges and threats appear in the ecosystem. In this interconnected world, smart objects have an important role in giving users the chance for life-logging in smart environments. However, smart devices have several limitations with regards to memory, resources and computation power, hindering the opportunity to apply well-established security algorithms and techniques for secure life-logging on the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. The need for secure and trustworthy life-logging in smart environments is vital, thus, a lightweight approach has to be considered to overcome the constraints of Smart Objects. The purpose of this paper is to present in details the current topics of life-logging in smart environments, while describing interconnection issues, security threats and suggesting a lightweight framework for ensuring security, privacy and trustworthy life-logging. In order to investigate the efficiency of the lightweight framework and the impact of the security attacks on energy consumption, an experimental test-bed was developed including two interconnected users and one smart attacker, who attempts to intercept transmitted messages or interfere with the communication link. Several mitigation factors, such as power control, channel assignment and AES-128 encryption were applied for secure life-logging. Finally, research into the degradation of the consumed energy regarding the described intrusions is presented.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 3","pages":"Pages 58-70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115797179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniel Schreckling, Johannes Köstler, Matthias Schaff
{"title":"Kynoid: Real-time enforcement of fine-grained, user-defined, and data-centric security policies for Android","authors":"Daniel Schreckling, Johannes Köstler, Matthias Schaff","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We introduce Kynoid, a real-time monitoring and enforcement framework for Android. Kynoid is based on user-defined security policies which are defined for data-items. This allows users to define temporal, spatial, and destination constraints which have to hold for single items. We introduce an innovative approach to allow for the real-time tracking and enforcement of such policies. In this way, Kynoid is the first extension for Android which enables the enforcement of security policies of data-items stored in shared resources. We outline Kynoid's architecture, present its operation and discuss it in terms of applicability, and performance. By providing a proof-of-concept implementation we further show the feasibility of our framework.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 3","pages":"Pages 71-80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122273181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Franz , B. Deiseroth , K. Hamacher , S. Jha , S. Katzenbeisser , H. Schröder
{"title":"Secure computations on non-integer values with applications to privacy-preserving sequence analysis","authors":"M. Franz , B. Deiseroth , K. Hamacher , S. Jha , S. Katzenbeisser , H. Schröder","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this work we describe a framework which allows to perform secure computations on non-integer values. To this end, we encode values in a way similar to floating point representation and describe protocols that allow to perform efficient secure two party computations on such encoded values. We present two approaches to realize the functionality of the framework. Both approaches come with different properties and are ready to use in various application scenarios. We implemented the framework in C++ and ran several experiments. This allows for a complexity analysis and for a comparison of the two different approaches. We further describe applications to privacy-preserving computations, which greatly benefit from the use of the new framework. In particular, we show how to run an important algorithm in the context of data analysis using Hidden Markov Models (HMM), namely the Viterbi algorithm, in a secure manner.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 3","pages":"Pages 117-128"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132444340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Matteo Dell'Amico , Gabriel Serme , Muhammad Sabir Idrees , Anderson Santana de Oliveira , Yves Roudier
{"title":"HiPoLDS: A Hierarchical Security Policy Language for Distributed Systems","authors":"Matteo Dell'Amico , Gabriel Serme , Muhammad Sabir Idrees , Anderson Santana de Oliveira , Yves Roudier","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Expressing security policies to govern distributed systems is a complex and error-prone task. Policies are hard to understand, often expressed with unfriendly syntax, making it difficult for security administrators and for business analysts to create intelligible specifications. We introduce the Hierarchical Policy Language for Distributed Systems (HiPoLDS), which has been designed to enable the specification of security policies in distributed systems in a concise, readable, and extensible way. HiPoLDS design focuses on decentralized execution environments under the control of multiple stakeholders. It represents policy enforcement through the use of distributed reference monitors, which control the flow of information between services. HiPoLDS allows the definition of both <em>abstract</em> and <em>concrete</em> policies, expressing respectively high-level properties required and concrete implementation details to be ultimately introduced into the service implementation.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 3","pages":"Pages 81-92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132457292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ioannis G. Askoxylakis, Mark Manulis, Joachim Posegga
{"title":"Security and privacy for digital ecosystems","authors":"Ioannis G. Askoxylakis, Mark Manulis, Joachim Posegga","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2013.02.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2013.02.001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 3","pages":"Page 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2013.02.001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134494200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Delphine Christin , Pablo Sánchez López , Andreas Reinhardt , Matthias Hollick , Michaela Kauer
{"title":"Share with strangers: Privacy bubbles as user-centered privacy control for mobile content sharing applications","authors":"Delphine Christin , Pablo Sánchez López , Andreas Reinhardt , Matthias Hollick , Michaela Kauer","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A continually increasing number of pictures and videos is shared in online social networks. Current sharing platforms, however, only offer limited options to define who has access to the content. Users may either share it with individuals or groups from their social graph, or make it available to the general public. Sharing content with users to which no social ties exist, even if they were physically close to the places where content was created and witnessed the same event, is however not supported by most existing platforms. We thus propose a novel approach to share content with such users based on so-called <em>privacy bubbles</em>. Privacy bubbles metaphorically represent the private sphere of the users and automatically confine the access to the content generated by the bubble creator to people within the bubble. Bubbles extend in both time and space, centered around the collection time and place, and their size can be adapted to the user's preferences. We confirm the user acceptance of our concept through a questionnaire-based study with 175 participants, and a prototype implementation shows the technical feasibility of our scheme.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 3","pages":"Pages 105-116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2012.10.004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133811439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Continuous keystroke dynamics: A different perspective towards biometric evaluation","authors":"Patrick Bours","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.02.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2012.02.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this paper we will describe a way to evaluate a biometric continuous keystroke dynamics system. Such a system will continuously monitor the typing behaviour of a user and will determine if the current user is still the genuine one or not, so that the system can be locked if a different user is detected. The main focus of this paper will be the way to evaluate the performance of such a biometric authentication system. The purpose of a performance evaluation for a static and for a continuous biometric authentication system differ greatly. For a static biometric system it is important to know how often a wrong decision is made. On the other hand, the purpose of a performance evaluation for a continuous biometric authentication system is not to see <em>if</em> an impostor is detected, but <em>how fast</em> he is detected. The performance of a continuous keystroke dynamic system will be tested based on this new evaluation method.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 1","pages":"Pages 36-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2012.02.001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114352785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Technology is not enough: Taking a holistic view for information assurance","authors":"Guy Bunker","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.12.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.12.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Information security has become a boardroom topic, lost laptops and hacked systems make front page news across the globe, but while technology is a key piece of any corporate security strategy, it is not enough. In this paper, Dr. Bunker examines the change in emphasis for information security from being hidden in the backroom of IT to a responsibility of every employee.</p><p>Security needs to be taken into account in every IT activity, but it has to match the requirements and needs of the business. Information security has given way to the more comprehensive information assurance which can be categorized into more than thirty different strategic, operational and tactical controls. This paper examines the different controls and how a maturity model can be used to prioritise improvements by concentrating on the people and the processes as well as the technology. Finally it looks at the implications of cloud computing on information assurance and on how people can be an organizations greatest security asset.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 1","pages":"Pages 19-25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.12.002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114911671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Practical application of information security models","authors":"Vladimir Jirasek","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.12.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.12.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Information risk security management is an area that is constantly moving to respond to new threats, standards and technologies. Security is now a part of information risk management, which in turn has a place in the overall business risk management strategy.</p><p>The security model can help with explaining why security is important, and can support justifications for that ‘rather expensive’ piece of technology, depending on the point of view, security policy and business appetite for risk.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"17 1","pages":"Pages 1-8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.12.004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115325741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}