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Automatic reconstruction and analysis of security policies from deployed security components

Security is a critical concern for any information system. Security properties such as confidentiality, integrity and availability need to be enforced in order to make systems safe. In complex environments, where information systems are composed by a number of heterogeneous subsystems, each subsystem plays a key role in the global system security. For the specific case of access-control, access-control policies may be found in several components (databases, networksand applications) all, supposedly, working together. Nevertheless since most times these policies have been manually implemented and/or evolved separately they easily become inconsistent. In this context, discovering and understanding which security policies are actually being enforced by the information system comes out as a critical necessity. The main challenge to solve is bridging the gap between the vendor-dependent security features and a higher-level representation that express these policies in a way that abstracts from the specificities of concrete system components, and thus, it's easier to understand and reason with. This high-level representation would also allow us to implement all evolution/refactoring/manipulation operations on the security policies in a reusable way. In this work we propose such a reverse engineering and integration mechanism for access-control policies. We rely on model-driven technologies to achieve this goal.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-01065944
Date30 June 2014
CreatorsMartinez, Salvador
PublisherEcole des Mines de Nantes
Source SetsCCSD theses-EN-ligne, France
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypePhD thesis

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