A generic Grid security policy reconciliation framework

Resolve Security Policies Conflicts Through Semantics Matching Alignment

Language-based information flow analysis is used to statically examine a program for information flows between objects of different security domains, and to verify these flows follow a given policy. When the program is distributed as mobile code, it may access resources whose domains depend on the client environment, or may face different security policies. In proof-carrying code scenarios, it is desirable to give a single proof that the program executes securely in any of these situations. This paper presents an object-oriented, Java-like language with runtime security types that can be inspected to ensure that flows between accessed objects are actually allowed before operations inducing these flows are performed. A type system is used to statically prove that the flow tests included in the program are sufficient, such that a noninterference property for the program is ensured regardless of the domains of objects and the effective security policy. Also, the paper outlines how the concepts of the type system are transferred to a bytecode language.

Effectively managing security policies in a large distributed Web Services environment is the key to secure e-business transactions. Security policy must ensure the end-to-end agreement for many-to-many interoperation; ensure the versioning interoperability and privacy of collaborating partners; and ensure the dynamic establishment of security policies because any statically defined security policy tends to be unsecured after a certain period of time. The traditional security policy configuration mechanisms, either the local configuration mechanism or the centralized configuration mechanism, cannot fully meet the above requirements. In this paper we describe a solution for managing security policies in a collaborative Web Services environment. This solution is based on ebXML CPP/CPA model and uses Interoperability Contract Document (ICD). It allows the collaboration parties to establish security policy dynamically for each individual interoperation; makes the selected policy confidential; and addresses the software, message, and policy versioning and interoperability issues. Our experience reveals the advantages of this approach over others.

The security of the operating system has always been the basis of information systems. Several security frameworks have been proposed to enhance the security of the operating system, such as SELinux and AppArmor. However, the major drawback of these solutions is the complexity of the security policy configuration in which strong professionalism is required. Therefore, there are many related studies on optimizing the process of configuring security policies, but so far the involvement of security experts is still required. In this paper, we aim to further optimize the AppArmor's security policy generating process and propose ASPGen, which is a novel framework for generating AppArmor security policies automatically. ASPGen can autogenerate security policy with the least privilege and RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) for applications, and effectively alleviate the complexity and subjectivity in manually configuring AppArmor's security policy, as well as the security threats that result from the improper policy. We implement the prototype of ASPGen in Ubuntu 16.04. Unlike previous approaches, ASPGen does not depend on experts after the expert system is built. In our experimental evaluation, several typical applications are chosen and generate their AppArmor security policies with ASPGen. The completeness and precision of the generated policies are evaluated and a case of mysql-server is thoroughly analyzed by comparing the default AppArmor security policies with the policies generated by ASPGen. The evaluation demonstrates that the policy generated by ASPGen is complete, precise, and fine-grained, even without expert intervention. Our contribution can be further improved with a more general and intelligent security policy generating mechanism and is being extended to support other security frameworks including SELinux and SEAndroid.

Many researchers have considered security policy management, including how to configure policies manually and even how to automatically generate security policies based on security requirements. Both can be error prone, especially when properties of the network topology change, because security requirements are usually not bound to any particular route path. Our DETER lab emulation results show that conflicts could be caused by these factors. Therefore, a systematic way to validate the correctness of the security policies is essential. This paper presents an approach, CLID (conflict and looping identification and detection), to verify whether a set of security policies (e.g. IPSec/VPN tunnels) satisfy the given security requirements, without causing any conflicts. This approach utilizes the definition of a security policy lo include network routing data as well as traffic selector information, thus it works for general network topologies. We also analyze and justify the correctness of the approach. The paper concludes with our simulation results and addresses future work.

The replacement of European Political Cooperation (EPC) by a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) under the terms of the 1993 Treaty on European Union (TEU) promised to create a much more effective European foreign policy within the context of a new commitment to external policy as a whole, including for the first time security and defence policy. Under TEU, it will be recalled that the EC was transformed into an EU constructed upon three ‘pillars’, the second of which contained CFSP. Thus CFSP immediately became one of the new Union activities and may appropriately be labelled Union foreign policy. An intergovernmental approach to foreign policy was reinforced by the pillar structure, but it was envisaged that CFSP would be integrated into other Union activities in ways that appeared to resolve continuing debates between integrationists and intergovernmentalists.

18 - Windows Server 2003 Security Management

Firewalls are essential elements of security policy enforcement in modern networks. However, managing a filtering security policy, especially for enterprise networks, has become complex and error-prone. Filtering rules have to be carefully written and organized in order to correctly implement the security policy and avoid policy anomalies. In this paper, we present a set of techniques and algorithms that provide (1) automatic anomaly discovery for rule conflicts and potential problems in legacy firewalls, (2) anomaly-free policy editing for rule insertion, modification and removal, and (3) concise translation of filtering rules to high-level textual description for user visualization and verification. These techniques significantly simplify the management of any generic firewall policy written as filtering rules, while minimizing network vulnerability due to filtering policy misconfiguration.

Providing an adequate security level in Cloud Environments is currently an extremely active research area. More specifically, malicious behaviors targeting large-scale Cloud data repositories (e.g. Denial of Service attacks) may drastically degrade the overall performance of such systems and cannot be detected by typical authentication mechanisms. In this paper we propose a generic security management framework allowing providers of Cloud data management systems to define and enforce complex security policies. This security framework is designed to detect and stop a large array of attacks defined through an expressive policy description language and to be easily interfaced with various data management systems. We show that we can efficiently protect a data storage system by evaluating our security framework on top of the BlobSeer data management platform. We evaluate the benefits of preventing a DoS attack targeted towards BlobSeer through experiments performed on the Grid'5000 testbed.

There is a continuous effort at addressing security challenges of large scale service oriented computing (SOC) infrastructures like grids. A lot of research efforts towards development of authentication and authorization models for grid systems have been made because existing grid security solutions do not satisfy some desirable access control requirements of distributed services; such as support for multiple security policies. However, most of these security models are domain and/or application specific. Domain/application-specific approach to providing security solution is a duplication of effort, which also increases the cost of developing and maintaining applications. This paper presents the design of an access control model for grid-based system that employs security as a service (SecaaS) approach. By SecaaS approach, each atomic access control function (such as authentication, authorization) will be provided as a reusable service that can be published and subscribed to by different grid entities. In this approach, each admin domain will no longer need to have its own domain-specific access control logic built into it. Whenever an access control service is required the domain administrator subscribes to this service from SecaaS. This approach has a number of benefits, including making changes to security policies dynamically on the fly.

As the importance of Knowledge Management System (KMS) in the military increases, Republic of Korea Army (ROK Army) developed Army Knowledge Portal. Although the members in the military are encouraged to use the portal, few members currently use it. This study was conducted to find variables to predict the user’s intention to use the portal, which contributes to activating the use of Army Knowledge Portal in the army. On the basis of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), ten variables such as perceived ease of use, general information security awareness, information security awareness, expectation for external rewards, expectation for relationships, sense of self-worth, attitude toward compliance with security policy, attitude toward knowledge sharing, intention of non-combat knowledge sharing, and intention of combat knowledge sharing were considered as independent variables. 105 participants on active duty who currently use or have experience to use the portal participated in this study. The results indicated that general information security awareness and information security awareness increases compliance with the information security policy. In addition, the attitude toward knowledge sharing is enhanced by expectations for relationship and sense of self-worth. Based on the results, the authors propose the need for policy alternatives to reinforce the reward system and security policy, which activates the use of Knowledge Portal Service for ROK Army.

Security policy management is critical to meet organizational needs and reduce potential risks because almost every organization depends on computer networks and the Internet for their daily operations. It is therefore important to specify and enforce security policies effectively. However, as organizations grow, so do their networks increasing the difficulty of deploying a security policy, especially across heterogeneous systems. In this paper, we introduce a policy framework called Chameleos-x which is designed to enforce security policies consistently across security-aware systems with network services-primarily operating systems, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems. Throughout this paper, we focus on the design and architecture of Chameleos-x and demonstrate how our policy framework helps organizations implement security policies in changing, diversity-rich environments. We also describe our experimentation of Chameleos-x to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Analyzing and administrating system security policies is difficult as policies become larger and more complex every day. The paper present work toward analyzing security policies and sessions in terms of security properties. Our intuition was that combining both visualization tools that could benefit from the expert’s eyes, and software analysis abilities, should lead to a new interesting way to study and manage security policies as well as users’ sessions. Rather than trying to mine large and complex policies to find possible flaws within, work may concentrate on which potential flaws are really exploited by attackers.Actually, the paper presents some methods and tools to visualize and manipulate large SELinux policies, with algorithms allowing to search for paths, such as information flows within policies.The paper also introduces a complementary original approach to analyze and visualize real attack logs as session graphs or information flow graphs, or even aggregated multiple-sessions graphs.Our wishes is that in the future, when those tools will be mature enough, security administrator can then confront the statical security view given by the security policy analysis and the dynamical and real-world view given by the parts of attacks that most often occurred.

Chapter 18 - Creating Effective Corporate Security Policies

We present a new model for authorization that integrates both local and distributed access control policies and that is extensible across applications and administrative domains. We introduce a general mechanism that is capable of implementing several security policies including role-based access control, Clark-Wilson, ACLs, capabilities, and lattice-based access controls. The generic authorization and access-control API (GAA API) provides a generic framework by which applications facilitate access control decisions and request authorization information about a particular resource. We have integrated our system with the Prospero resource manager and globus security, infrastructure.