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The increased complexity of modern access control (AC) systems stems partly from the need to support diverse and multiple administrative domains. Systems engineering is a key technology to manage this complexity since it is capable of assuring that an operational system will adhere to the initial conceptual design and defined requirements. Specifically, the verification stage of an AC system should be based on techniques that have a sound and mathematical underpinning. Working on this assumption, model checking techniques are applied for the verification of predefined system properties, and thus, conducting a security analysis of a system. In this paper, we propose the utilization of automated and error-free model checking techniques for the verification of security properties in multi-domain AC systems. Therefore, we propose a formal definition in temporal logic of four AC system properties regarding secure inter-operation with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) policies in order to be verified by using model checking. For this purpose, we demonstrate the implementation of a tool chain for expressing RBAC security policies, reasoning on role hierarchies and properly feeding the model checking process. The proposed approach can be applied in any RBAC model to efficiently detect non-conformance between an AC system and its security specifications. As a proof of concept, we provide examples illustrating the verification of the defined secure inter-operation properties in multi-domain RBAC policies.

In traditional framework, mandatory access control (MAC) system and malicious software are run in kernel mode. Malicious software can stop MAC systems to be started and make it do invalid. This problem cannot be solved under the traditional framework if the operating system (OS) is comprised since malwares are running in ring0 level. In this paper, we propose a novel way to use hypervisors to protect kernel integrity and the access control system in commodity operating systems. We separate the access control system into three parts: policy management (PM), security server (SS) and policy enforcement (PE). Policy management and the security server reside in the security domain to protect them against malware and the isolation feather of the hypervisor can protect them from attacks. We add an access vector cache (AVC) between SS and PE in the guest OS, in order to speed up communication between the guest OS and the security domain. The policy enforcement module is retained in the guest OS for performance. The security of AVC and PE can be ensured by using a memory protection mechanism. The goal of protecting the OS kernel is to ensure the security of the execution path. We implement the system by a modified Xen hypervisor. The result shows that we can secure the security of the access control system in the guest OS with no overhead compared with modules in the latter. Our system offers a centralized security policy for virtual domains in virtual machine environments.

Towards more pro-active access control in computer systems and networks

6 - Life Safety and Exit Devices

Cloud computing offers cost effective services on-demand which encourage critical infrastructure providers to consider migrating to the cloud. Critical infrastructures are considered as a backbone of modern societies such as power plants and water. Information in cloud computing is likely to be shared among different entities, which could have various degrees of sensitivity. This requires robust isolation and access control mechanisms. Although various access control models and policies have been developed, they cannot fulfil requirements for a cloud based access control system. The reason is that cloud computing has a diverse sets of security requirements and unique security challenges such as multi-tenant and heterogeneity of security policies, rules and domains. This thesis provides a detailed study of cloud computing security challenges and threats, which were used to identify security requirements for various critical infrastructure providers. We found that an access control system is a crucial security requirement for the surveyed critical infrastructure providers. Furthermore, the requirement analysis was used to propose a new criteria to evaluate access control systems for cloud computing. Moreover, this work presents a new cloud based access control model to meet the identified cloud access control requirements. The model does not only ensure the secure sharing of resources among potential untrusted tenants, but also has the capacity to support different access permissions for the same cloud user. Our focused in the proposed model is the lack of data isolation in lower levels (CPU caches), which could lead to bypass access control models to gain some sensitive information by using cache side-channel attacks. Therefore, the thesis investigates various real attack scenarios and the gaps in existing mitigation approaches. It presents a new Prime and Probe cache side-channel attack, which can give detailed information about addresses accessed by a virtual machine with no need for any information about cache sets accessed by the virtual machine. The design, implementation and evaluation of a proposed solution preventing cache side-channel attacks are also presented in the thesis. It is a new lightweight solution, which introduces very low overhead (less than 15,000 CPU cycles). It can be applied in any operating system and prevents cache side-channel attacks in cloud computing. The thesis also presents a new detecting cache side-channel attacks solution. It focuses on the infrastructure used to host cloud computing tenants by counting cache misses caused by a virtual machine. The detection solutions has 0% false negative and 15% false positive.

Employees’ failure to comply with information systems security policies is a major concern for information technology security managers. In efforts to understand this problem, IS security researchers have traditionally viewed violations of IS security policies through the lens of deterrence theory. In this article, we show that neutralization theory, a theory prominent in Criminology but not yet applied in the context of IS, provides a compelling explanation for IS security policy violations and offers new insight into how employees rationalize this behavior. In doing so, we propose a theoretical model in which the effects of neutralization techniques are tested alongside those of sanctions described by deterrence theory. Our empirical results highlight neutralization as an important factor to take into account with regard to developing and implementing organizational security policies and practices.

The article shows the relevance of the widespread use of computer vision technology on the example of face recognition as part of the access control and management system. The main methods that are used in the implementation of classical control systems and access control are considered. The scheme for the implementation of the access control with face recognition technology is described. The use of this technology makes it possible to increase the level of information security of enterprises and, as a result, reduce the possible financial damage from the implementation of attacks on their assets from illegitimate penetration into the protected area through the access control system using the passes of legal users.

Peers may help others avoid violating organisational information security policies (ISPs). This study explores how peer monitoring reduces employee ISP violation intention. We propose that peer monitoring discourages employees from violating ISP. Moreover, trust plays an important role. Trust not only facilitates peer monitoring, but also moderates the effect of peer monitoring on employee ISP violation intention. In addition, collective responsibility leads to peer monitoring. We test our research model with data from two waves of surveys of 254 employees in the United States conducted two weeks apart. We utilise four scenarios in the second wave of surveys capturing the dependent variable and measure all other constructs in the first wave of surveys. Our results suggest that peer monitoring decreases one’s intention to violate ISPs. Furthermore, both collective responsibility and trust contribute to peer monitoring. Finally, trust amplifies the effect of peer monitoring on employees’ intention to violate ISPs. We discuss the theoretical contributions and practical implications.

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a widely popular access control mechanism because of its convenience for authorization administration, as well as various security policies, such as separation-of-duty constraints and cardinality constraints. In recent few years, role-engineering technology has emerged as an efficient approach to construct optimal RBAC systems. However, the top-down approaches are labor-intensive and error-prone; the bottom-up approaches lack flexibility and scalability as the organizational requirements change dynamically, and cannot generate valuable or meaningful roles that are relevant to actual application scenarios. Furthermore, most conventional methods do not consider multiple cardinality constraints. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel hybrid role-engineering method. First, to develop an initial access control system while alleviating manual workloads, we use the natural language processing techniques to extract machine-readable and machine-enforceable access control policies from the top-down natural language requirement documents. Second, to flexibly meet diverse organizational requirements while enhancing the security of role-engineering processes, according to different evaluation measures or optimization objectives, we define several variants of the optimization problem with multiple cardinality constraints via Boolean matrix decomposition and present a unified modelling framework for these variants using integer linear programming technique. Third, to verify whether the constraints can be satisfied in the constructed access control system, we present the heuristic optimization algorithms in the bottom-up ways. The experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

An access control system is a collection of rules used to restrict the visibility, access, and usage of the data resources in an institutional environment. When implemented, these rules provide a policy for achieving the security of the institution, establishing a hierarchy of the employees depending on their rights over the institution’s data resouces. An access control system is based on two fundamental concepts: authentication (that verifyies the user's identity) and authorization (that provides a hierarchy of the employees according to their access rights over the institutional resources). Among the most commonly used access control models we recall Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), in which users with the same role have equal access rights to data resources, Discretionary Access Control (DAC), in which the system owner decides which user has access to system resources, and Mandatory Access Control (MAC), in which a series of rules, with a high level of security established by a predefined authority, are used. In this article, we will study the last two models, namely DAC and MAC, along with their main implementations: Access Control Matrix and the Take-Grant models for DAC, BIBA and Bell-LaPadula for MAC.

SummaryThe block chain is the emerging domain that offers the features like shared, immutable, and decentralized dataset that saves the asset's history. Security and storage are the most challenging aspect. The classical techniques' issues and challenges are an encouragement for developing a fresh block chain‐assisted IPFS model with access control policies. Hence, this research paper introduces an effective access control and authentication based on an interplanetary file system (IPFS)‐based block chain and access control system for attaining secured transactions. The developed method comprises five entities, that is smart contract, data owner, data requester, block chain and IPFS along with eight phases, to be exact setup, user registration, initialization, storage and data encryption, authentication, testing, access control, and decryption phase, to provide better access control and storage capacity. The proposed IPFS‐based block chain and access control system offered effective storage and secure transactions in the block chain network. The highest detection rate (0.870), lowest communication overhead (0.766 MB), and highest privacy rate (0.719) are all achieved by the proposed IPFS‐based block chain and access control system.

Access control system is an important component to protect patients’ information from abuse in a health care system. It is a major concern in the management, design, and development of healthcare systems. Designing access control policies for healthcare systems is complicated due to the dynamic and inherent complexity of the tasks performed by the healthcare personnel. Permissions in access control systems are usually granted on the basis of static policies. However, static policies are not enough to cope with various situations such as emergencies. Most often, the Break-the-glass mechanism is used to bypass static policies to handle emergency situations. Since healthcare systems are critical systems, where errors can be very costly in terms of lives, quality of life, and/or dollars, it is crucial to identify discrepancies between policy specifications and their intended function to implement correctly a flexible access control system. Formal verifications are necessary for exhaustive verification and validation of policy specifications to ensure that the policy specifications truly encapsulate the desires of the policy authors. We present a verifiable framework to enact a dynamic access control model by integrating the ANSI/INCTIS RBAC Reference Model in a workflow and an approach for property verifications of the access control model. Access control policies are expressed by the formal semantics of a model checker and properties are verified by the DiVinE model checker.

Cloud computing is synonym of high performance computing. It offers a very scalable infrastructure to deploy a huge number of systems and services without any impact of the performance. Such a wide distributed infrastructure, as for the traditional systems, requires authorization and access control mechanisms to ensure the basic security requirements to restrict the access to resources. To satisfy these requirements cloud providers still rely on the traditional authorization and access control systems that in some critical cases can generate performance issues. More the access control structure is complex (many authorization levels, many users and resources to protect), more the enforcement of the access control policies is slow. In this paper we propose a performance study for these traditional access control mechanisms demonstrating the overhead generated by the authorizations checking that can appear in extreme usage conditions. We propose a new approach to make access control systems more scalable and adapted to cloud computing high performance requirements. This approach is based on a high speed caching access control tree that accelerates the decision without impacting on the consistency of the rules. We compare the performance test results obtained by our solution to a traditional Access control system deployed in the cloud.

This paper first brief reviews the state of the security technology research and access control in the web service environment. Despite recent advances in access control approaches for Web Services, the heterogeneity of subjects and objects in Web Service environment has made it difficult to development of effective access control system. So we present a context-aware service-orient role-based access control model (CSRBAC). In CSRBAC model, access control system can make its access control decisions by capturing security relevant environmental context, such as time, location, operation state, or other environmental information. Based on CSRBAC model, a secure architecture model for Web Services is presented. It implements an access control system with dynamically grant and adapt permissions to users based on their current context. Compared to traditional access control mechanisms, the CSRBAC model can provide management flexibility and improved security for Web Services applications.KeywordsAccess ControlRole AssignmentContext ParameterPolicy Decision PointAccess Control SystemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Access control is an important security parameter in industrial networks; a mismanaged access control system leads to security breaches. The existing security solutions significantly consider the access control methods in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT); however, falsified identity can bypass the secure access control system. Thus, a centralized access control method leads to risks for data security. We are the first to address the risk factors of granted access in an industrial environment and present a risk-adaptive access control framework for IIoTs. Our proposed solution framework uses blockchain to provide secure decentralized access control in the industrial environment with privacy-preserved multi-party data sharing. We name our framework “Adaptive Access controL for Multi-party data cOmputation in iNdustrial Decentralization (AALMOND)”. AALMOND uses lightweight cryptographic operations to reduce the complexity of the execution and loosen up the tight bounds on resource-constrained industrial devices. Further, the risk-adaptive access control in AALMOND provides a better security analysis of the multi-party sharing data. Our framework uses role-based, attribute-based, and organization-based access controls to map the assets for risk calculation. We put all the required policies in a smart contract for the ease of multi-party data sharing to obtain a transparent access control execution more suitably. We also pioneer in the calculation of the risk adaptivity of AALMOND considering the NIST recommendations of operation risk, security risk, and heuristic risk. We measure the performance of AALMOND with state-of-the-art frameworks based on throughput, latency, complexity analysis, and risk adaptivity factors. We find that AALMOND is efficient for IIoTs as it shows 24% reduced latency and 20% better throughput as compared to the other existing models.