3845553
Service-Oriented Security Architecture for CII based on Sensor Networks
The extraordinary growth of the information society is originating a high dependency on ICT. This provokes that those strongly interrelated technological infrastructures, as well as the information systems that underpin them, become highly critical, since their disruption would lead to high economical, material and, sometimes, human loss. As a consequence, the protection of these critical information infrastructures is becoming a major objective for governments and companies. In this paper, we give an overview of the main challenges and open research issues on critical information infrastructure security, and introduce an on-going research project that, using wireless sensor networks as an underlying technology, is dealing with those problems. Our research project focuses on the development of protection, control, evaluation, maintenance and verification mechanisms, integrated into a secure service-oriented architecture
3856838
Trust, Privacy and Security in E-Business: Requirements and Solutions
An important aspect of e-business is the area of e-commerce. One of the most severe restraining factors for the proliferation of e-commerce, is the lack of trust between customers and sellers, consumer privacy concerns and the lack of security measures required to assure both businesses and customers that their business relationship and transactions will be carried out in privacy, correctly, and timely. This paper considers trust privacy and security issues in e-commerce applications and discusses methods and technologies that can be used to fulfil the pertinent requirements.
3850135
Classifying Public Key Certificates
In spite of the fact that there are several companies that (try to) sell public key certificates, there is still no unified or standardized classification scheme that can be used to compare and put into perspective the various offerings. In this paper, we try to start filling this gap and propose a four-dimensional scheme that can be used to uniformly describe and classify public key certificates. The scheme distinguishes between (i) who owns a certificate, (ii) how the certificate owner is registered, (iii) on what medium the certificate (or the private key, respectively) is stored, and (iv) what type of functionality the certificate is intended to be used for. We think that using these or similar criteria to define and come up with unified or even standardized classes of public key certificate is useful and urgently needed in practice.
3098775
A First Approach to Provide Anonymity in Attribute Certificates
This paper focus on two security services for internet ap- plications: authorization and anonymity. Traditional authorization solu- tions are not very helpful for many of the Internet applications; however, attribute certificates proposed by ITU-T seems to be well suited and provide adequate solution. On the other hand, special attention is paid to the fact that many of the operations and transactions that are part of Internet applications can be easily recorded and collected. Consequently, anonymity has become a desirable feature to be added in many cases. In this work we propose a solution to enhance the X.509 attribute certifi- cate in such a way that it becomes a conditionally anonymous attribute certificate. Moreover, we present a protocol to obtain such certificates in a way that respects users' anonymity by using a fair blind signature scheme. We also show how to use such certificates and describe a few cases where problems could arise, identifying some open problems.
11225099
Casual virtual private network
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) [1] allow individuals and business to create and maintain secure communication channels between their own local networks using public and insecure networks, like Internet, instead of private and leased lines. The main purpose of a VPN is to securely and transparently connect two or more remote networks to form virtually a single network. Network architectures defined by VPNs are inherently more scalable and flexible than pure private networks because they allow organizations to add and remove branch offices in an easier way. Other benefits of VPNs include obtaining almost the same capabilities of private or leased lines at much lower cost, and providing roaming users (or “Road-Warriors”) with secure connections to their corporate or personal networks whenever they need them. VPNs achieve the same level of protection as private networks using security mechanisms like encryption and authentication schemes. Those security mechanisms are centrally managed by a pre-defined security policy, which controls all communications inside the VPN by dictating when and how the protection is applied. In most cases, for security reasons, VPN users cannot change the security policy, and they cannot dynamically choose whether their communications are going to be protected or not. This high level of protection and connectivity achieved by VPNs, although desirable and necessary, is not useful for networks which do not want to provide transparent access to their resources within their networks, but only want to provide temporary secure access to internal services based on users’ demands. Although it is possible to provide protection for every service using modified clients and protocols, it could be useful to have an architecture that provides a userinitiated, transparent and secure connection between networks without securing every individual service. We call the
3781878
Applying SDL to Formal Analysis of Security Systems
Nowadays, it is widely accepted that critical systems have to be formally analyzed to achieve well-known benefits of formal methods. To study the security of communication systems, we have developed a methodology for the application of the formal analysis techniques commonly used in communication protocols to the analysis of cryptographic ones. In particular, we have extended the design and analysis phases with security properties. Our proposal uses a specification notation based on MSC, which can be automatically translated into a generic SDL specification. This SDL system can then be used for the analysis of the desired security properties, by using an observer process schema. Apart from our main goal of providing a notation for describing the formal specification of security systems, our proposal also brings additional benefits, such as the study of the possible attacks to the system, and the possibility of reusing the specifications produced to describe and analyze more complex systems.
467068
Run-Time Support for Adaptive Heavyweight Services
By definition, a heavyweight network service requires a significant amount of computation to complete its task. Providing a heavyweight service is challenging for a number of reasons. First, since the service can typically not be provided in a timely fashion using a single server at the remote site, multiple hosts at both the server and client sites must be employed. Second, the available compute and network resources change with respect to time. Thus, an effective service must be adaptive in the sense that it is able to transparently aggregate the available resources and react to the changing availability of these resources. In this paper we present a framework that allows us to build these kinds of adaptive heavyweight services. Experimental results with a distributed visualization service suggest that the cost imposed by the new capability is reasonable.
1101949
Preliminary Report on the Design of a Framework for Distributed Visualization
The paper is a preliminary report on the de- sign of a framework, called Dv, for building interactive distributed visualizations on computational grids. The framework is based on a form of mobile object, called an active frame, that consists of application data and a pro- gram that manipulates the data. The system provides a flexible framework for building distributed applications that are performance-portable in the presence of hetero- geneous resources and that adapt to dynamic changes in the status of system resources such as processor cycles and network bandwidth.
1480760
Evaluation of a resource selection mechanism for complex network services
Providing complex (resource-intensive) network services is challenging because the resources they need and the resources that are available can vary significantly from request to request. To address this issue, we have proposed a flexible mechanism, called active frames, that provides a basis for selecting a set of available distributed computing resources, and then mapping tasks onto those resources. As a proof of concept, we have used active frames to build a remote visualization service, called Dv, that allows users to visualize the contents of scientific datasets stored at remote locations. We evaluate the performance of active frames, in the context of Dv. In particular, we address the following two questions: (1) what performance penalty do we pay for the flexibility of the active frames mechanism? (2) can the throughput of a service based on active frames be predicted with reasonable accuracy from micro-benchmarks? The results of the evaluation suggest that the overhead imposed by active frames is reasonable (roughly 5%), and that simple models based on micro-benchmarks can conservatively predict measured throughput with reasonable accuracy (at most 20%).