We consider the distributed access enforcement problem for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) systems. Such enforcement has become important with RBAC's increasing adoption, and the proliferation of data that needs to be protected. We provide a platform for assessing candidates for access enforcement in a distributed architecture for enforcement. The platform provides the ability to encode data structures and algorithms for enforcement, and to measure time-, space- and administrative efficiency. To validate our platform, we use it to compare the state of the art in enforcement, CPOL [6], with two other approaches, the directed graph and the access matrix [9, 10]. We consider encodings of RBAC sessions in each, and propose and justify a benchmark for the assessment. We conclude with the somewhat surprising observation that CPOL is not necessarily the most efficient approach for access enforcement in distributed RBAC deployments.

With continued advances in computing, the amount of digital data continues to grow at an astounding rate. This has strained enterprise infrastructures and triggered development of service oriented architectures. In recent years, storage has also begun its transformation into a class of service. By outsourcing storage to an external storage service provider (SSP), enterprises not only cut management cost but also obtain on-demand infrastructure with superior disaster recovery and content dissemination capabilities. Wide deployment of this new outsourced storage environment requires solutions to many challenging problems. The foremost is the development of usable security and access control mechanisms that provide desirable levels of data confidentiality without placing an inordinate amount of trust into the SSP. This absence of a trusted reference monitor is a fundamental departure from traditional mechanisms and new solutions are required. The second important challenge is the autonomic management of SSP's infrastructure, uniquely characterized by a highly dynamic workload with large data capacity requirements. This dissertation research proposes models and techniques to address these two challenges. First, we introduce a novel access control system called xACCESS that uses cryptographic access control primitives (CAPs) to "embed" access control into stored data. This eliminates any dependency on the SSP for enforcement of security policies. We also analyze the privacy characteristics of its data sharing mechanisms and propose enhancements for more secure and convenient data sharing. We also develop a secure multiuser search approach that permits hosting of secured search indices at untrusted SSPs. We introduce a novel access control barrel (ACB) primitive that embeds access control into indices to prevent unauthorized information extraction during search. Our contribution to the autonomic SSP storage management has two important highlights. First, we have developed an impact analysis engine that efficiently analyzes the impact of a client-initiated change (workload surge, storage growth) on the SSP storage area network with minimal administrator involvement. Second, we have designed a new algorithm to quickly perform reallocation of resources in order to efficiently integrate the client change.

Encryption helps to ensure that information within a session is not compromised. Authentication and access control measures ensure legitimate and appropriate access to information, and prevent inappropriate access to such resources. While encryption, authentication and access control each has its own responsibility in securing a communication session, a combination of these three mechanisms can provide much better protection for information. This thesis addresses encryption, authentication and access control related problems in cloud and distributed environments, since these problems are very common in modern organization environment. The first one is a User-friendly Location-free Encryption System for Mobile Users (UFLE). It is an encryption and authentication system which provides maximum security to sensitive data in distributed environment: corporate, home and outdoors scenarios, but requires minimum user effort (i.e. no biometric entry, or possession of cryptographic tokens) to access the data. It makes users securely and easily access data any time and any place, as well as avoids data breach due to stolen/lost laptops and USB flash. The multi-factor authentication protocol provided in this scheme is also applicable to cloud storage. The second one is a Simple Privacy-Preserving Identity-Management for Cloud Environment (SPICE). It is the first digital identity management system that can satisfy “unlinkability”and “delegatable authentication” in addition to other desirable properties in cloud environment. Unlinkability ensures that none of the cloud service providers (CSPs), even if they collude, can link the transactions of the same user. On the other hand, delegatable authentication is unique to the cloud platform, in which several CSPs may join together to provide a packaged service, with one of them being the source provider which interacts with the clients and performs authentication, while the others are receiving CSPs which will be transparent to the clients. The authentication should be delegatable such that the receiving CSP can authenticate a user without a direct communication with either the user or the registrar, and without fully trusting the source CSP. The third one addresses re-encryption based access control issue in cloud and distributed storage. We propose the first non-transferable proxy re-encryption scheme [16] which successfully achieves the non-transferable property. Proxy re-encryption allows a third-party (the proxy) to re-encrypt a ciphertext which has been encrypted for one party without seeing the underlying plaintext so that it can be decrypted by another. A proxy re-encryption scheme is said to be non-transferable if the proxy and a set of colluding delegatees cannot re-delegate decryption rights to other parties. The scheme can be utilized for a content owner to delegate content decryption rights to users in the untrusted cloud storage. The advantages of using such scheme are: decryption keys are managed by the content owner, and plaintext is always hidden from cloud provider. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

We consider the distributed access enforcement problem for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) systems. Such enforcement has become important with RBAC's increasing adoption, and the proliferation of data that needs to be protected. We provide a platform for assessing candidates for access enforcement in a distributed architecture for enforcement. The platform provides the ability to encode data structures and algorithms for enforcement, and to measure time-, space- and administrative efficiency. To validate our platform, we use it to compare the state of the art in enforcement, CPOL [6], with two other approaches, the directed graph and the access matrix [9, 10]. We consider encodings of RBAC sessions in each, and propose and justify a benchmark for the assessment. We conclude with the somewhat surprising observation that CPOL is not necessarily the most efficient approach for access enforcement in distributed RBAC deployments.

Health Information Systems (HIS) make extensive use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The use of ICT aids in improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare services by making healthcare information available at the point of care (Goldstein, Groen, Ponkshe, and Wine, 2007). The increasing availability of healthcare data presents security and privacy issues which have not yet been fully addressed (Liu, Caelli, May, and Croll, 2008a). Healthcare organisations have to comply with the security and privacy requirements stated in laws, regulations and ethical standards, while managing healthcare information. Protecting the security and privacy of healthcare information is a very complex task (Liu, May, Caelli and Croll, 2008b). In order to simplify the complexity of providing security and privacy in HIS, appropriate information security services and mechanisms have to be implemented. Solutions at the application layer have already been implemented in HIS such as those existing in healthcare web services (Weaver et al., 2003). In addition, Discretionary Access Control (DAC) is the most commonly implemented access control model to restrict access to resources at the OS layer (Liu, Caelli, May, Croll and Henricksen, 2007a). Nevertheless, the combination of application security mechanisms and DAC at the OS layer has been stated to be insufficient in satisfying security requirements in computer systems (Loscocco et al., 1998). This thesis investigates the feasibility of implementing Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to enforce a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) policy to help protect resources at the Operating System (OS) layer. SELinux provides Mandatory Access Control (MAC) mechanisms at the OS layer. These mechanisms can contain the damage from compromised applications and restrict access to resources according to the security policy implemented. The main contribution of this research is to provide a modern framework to implement and manage SELinux in HIS. The proposed framework introduces SELinux Profiles to restrict access permissions over the system resources to authorised users. The feasibility of using SELinux profiles in HIS was demonstrated through the creation of a prototype, which was submitted to various attack scenarios. The prototype was also subjected to testing during emergency scenarios, where changes to the security policies had to be made on the spot. Attack scenarios were based on vulnerabilities common at the application layer. SELinux demonstrated that it could effectively contain attacks at the application layer and provide adequate flexibility during emergency situations. However, even with the use of current tools, the development of SELinux policies can be very complex. Further research has to be made in order to simplify the management of SELinux policies and access permissions. In addition, SELinux related technologies, such as the Policy Management Server by Tresys Technologies, need to be researched in order to provide solutions at different layers of protection.

In the area of computer network security, standardization work has been conducted for several years. However, the sub area of access control and authorization has so far been left out of major standardizing. This thesis explores the ongoing standardization for access control and authorization. In addition, areas and techniques supporting access control are investigated. Access control in its basic forms is described to point out the building blocks that always have to be considered when an access policy is formulated. For readers previously unfamiliar with network security a number of basic concepts are presented. An overview of access control in public networks introduces new conditions and points out standards related to access control. None of the found standards fulfills all of our requirements at current date. The overview includes a comparison between competing products, which meet most of the stated conditions. In parallel with this report a prototype was developed. The purpose of the prototype was to depict how access control could be administered and to show the critical steps in formulating an access policy.

MHRD PhD scholarship / With Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips (MPSoCs) pervading our lives, security issues are emerging as a serious problem and attacks against these systems are becoming more critical and sophisticated. We have designed and implemented different hardware based solutions to ensure security of an MPSoC. Security assisting modules can be implemented at different abstraction levels of an MPSoC design. We propose solutions both at circuit level and system level of abstractions. At the VLSI circuit level abstraction, we consider the problem of presence of noise voltage in input signal coming from outside world. This noise voltage disturbs the normal circuit operation inside a chip causing false logic reception. If the disturbance is caused intentionally the security of a chip may be compromised causing glitch/transient attack. We propose an input receiver with hysteresis characteristic that can work at voltage levels between 0.9V and 5V. The circuit can protect the MPSoC from glitch/transient attack. At the system level, we propose solutions targeting Network-on-Chip (NoC) as the on-chip communication medium. We survey the possible attack scenarios on present-day MPSoCs and investigate a new attack scenario, i.e., router attack targeted toward NoC enabled MPSoC. We propose different monitoring-based countermeasures against routing table-based router attack in an MPSoC having multiple Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Software attacks, the most common type of attacks, mainly exploit vulnerabilities like buffer overflow. This is possible if proper access control to memory is absent in the system. We propose four hardware based mechanisms to implement Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model in NoC based MPSoC.

Táto diplomová práca sa zameriava zvyšovanie bezpečnosti v operačných systémoch založených na Red Hat Enterprise Linux, na základe analyzovaných zraniteľnosti za posledných 5 rokov. V teoretickej časti sú popísané slabiny a zraniteľnosti, základné bezpečnostné mechanizmy v Linuxe, so zameraním na technológiu SELinux. Technológia SELinux je súčasťou operačných systémov Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora a CentOS. Na základe analyzovaných zraniteľností bola v praktickej časti navrhnutá konfigurácia technológie SELinux. V návrhu sú popísané prvky, ktoré sa budú konfigurovať a tými sú SELinuxové booleany, SELinuxové moduly a SELinuxoví užívatelia, so zameraním na ochranu pamäte, eskalovanie privilégií, spúšťaniu kódu, úniku dat a obmedzenie procesov a užívateľov. Na základe návrhov bola vytvorená konfigurácia v konfiguračnom nástroji Ansible, ktorej cieľom je umožniť užívateľovi jednoducho a rýchlo nakonfigurovať hosťa. Okrem nej boli vytvorene ďalšie dve konfigurácie, ktoré umožnia vrátiť systém do predchádzajúceho stavu alebo uzamknúť SELinuxovú konfiguráciu. Následne sa overoval dopad konfigurácií na použiteľnosť systému a nájdené chyby boli opravené alebo nahlásené. Posledná časť overuje funkčnosť konfigurácie pred zneužitím zraniteľností.

Database security is vital to retain confidentiality and integrity of data as well as prevent security threats such as privilege abuse. The most common form of privilege abuse is excessive privilege abuse, which entails assigning users with excessive privileges beyond their job function, which can be abused deliberately or inadvertently. The thesis’s objective is to determine how to prevent privilege abuse in the NoSQL database MongoDB. Prior studies have noted the importance of access control to secure databases from privilege abuse. Access control is essential to manage and protect the accessibility of the data stored and restrict unauthorised access. Therefore, the study analyses MongoDB’s embedded access control through experimental testing to test various built-in and advanced privileges roles in preventing privilege abuse. The results indicate that privilege abuse can be prevented if users are granted roles composed of the least privileges. Additionally, the results indicate that assigning users with excessive privileges exposes the system to privilege abuse. The study also underlines that an inaccurate allocation of privileges or permissions to users of databases may have profound consequences for the system and organisation, such as data breach and data manipulation. Hence, organisations that utilise information technology should be obliged to protect their interests and databases from others and their members through access control policies. / Datasäkerhet är avgörande för att bevara datats konfidentialitet och integritet samt för att förhindra säkerhetshot som missbruk av privilegier. Missbruk av överflödig privilegier, är den vanligaste formen av privilegier missbruk. Detta innebär att en användare tilldelas obegränsad behörighet utöver det som behövs för deras arbete, vilket kan missbrukas medvetet eller av misstag. Examensarbetets mål är att avgöra hur man kan förhindra missbruk av privilegier i NoSQL-databasen MongoDB. Tidigare studier har noterat vikten av åtkomstkontroll för att säkra databaser från missbruk av privilegier. Åtkomstkontroll är viktigt för att hantera och skydda åtkomlighet för de lagrade data samt begränsa obegränsad åtkomst. Därför analyserar arbetet MongoDBs inbäddade åtkomstkontroll genom experimentell testning för att testa olika inbyggda och avancerade priviligierade roller för att förhindra missbruk av privilegier. Resultaten indikerar att missbruk av privilegier kan förhindras om användare får roller som har färre privilegier. Dessutom visar resultaten att tilldelning av användare med obegränsade privilegier utsätter systemet för missbruk av privilegier. Studien understryker också att en felaktig tilldelning av privilegier eller behörigheter för databasanvändare kan få allvarliga konsekvenser för systemet och organisationen, såsom dataintrång och datamanipulation. Därför bör organisationer som använder informationsteknologi ha som plikt att skydda sina tillgångar och databaser från obehöriga men även företagets medarbetare som inte är beroende av datat genom policys för åtkomstkontroll.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Today there are many security solutions available which can facilitate both protection and sharing of telemetry data. While the technologies behind these solutions are maturing [1] [2] [3], most products lack a consistent and coherent paradigm for enforcing who is able to access the secured data, what is done with it, and insuring it can be recovered if the person who secured it is disabled.