Policy enforcement in the workplace

Basic Security Concepts - Why is Computer and Network Security Important. Background and History. The Security Trinity. Information Security. Risk Assessment. Security Models. Basic Terminology. More Basic Terminology. Threats, Vulnerabilities and Attacks - Protocols. The OSI Reference Model. TCP/IP Protocol Suite. Useful Web Sites. Search Engines. Mailing Lists. Encryption, Digital Signatures and Certification - Cryptography. Stream Ciphers. Breaking Ciphers. Block Ciphers. Encryption. Public Key Cryptosystems. Message Integrity. Authentication. Digital Signatures. Competing Standards. Digital Certificates. Limitations of Digital Certificates. Certificate Authorities. Public Key Infrastructure. The Future. The Limitations of Encryption. Kerberos - How Kerberos Works. Kerberos- Limitations. Encryption on the WWW - The World Wide Web. Secure Sockets Layer (HTTPS). Secure HTTP (SHTTP). Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Viewing Digital Certificates with Internet Explorer. Viewing the Encryption Strength of IE5. Viewing Certification Authorities with IE5. Netscape Navigator. Viewing Digital Certificates with Navigator. Authenticode Certificates. E-Mail - E-Mail Issues. E-Mail Issues. Secure E-Mail Protocols. Web-Based E-Mail Services. Security of Stored Messages. Identity: Spoofing and Hiding. E-Mail as a weapon. E-Mail Policies. E-Mail Privacy. Auto-Responses. Operating System Security -- Passwords. Password Attacks. Onetime Passwords. Access Control. Data Redundancy. General Recommendations. Modems. Useful Tools. LAN Security - LAN Guidelines. Controlling End-User Access. Concurrent Logins. Available Disk Space. Restrictions to Location or Workstation. Time/Day Restrictions. Access to Directories and Trustee Rights. File Attributes. Other Privileges. Single Sign-On. Policy-Based Network Management. Honeypot Systems. Network Segmentation. Static IP Addresses vs. DHCP. Media and Protocols - Network Media. Plenum Cabling and Risers. WANs. Redundancy and Alternative Connections. Routers and SNMP - Router Issues. SNMP. Virtual Private Networks - Encryption on the Network. Node-to-Node Encryption. End-to-End Encryption. Where to Encrypt. Virtual Private Networks. PPTP. L2TP. IPSec. SOCKS. Firewalls - Firewalls Pros and Cons. Types of Firewalls. Packet Filters vs. Proxies. Firewall Configurations. Restricting Users' Access to the Internet. Firewall Products. Personal Firewalls. Biometrics - Identification and Authentication. Biometric Identification and Authentication. Biometric Identification Reliability. Backup Authentication. Environmental Conditions. User Acceptance. Security of the Biometric System. Interoperability. Costs vs. Savings. Policies and Procedures - Policies vs. Procedures. Information Security Policy Objectives. Developing Security Policies. Policy and Procedure Manuals. Policy Awareness & Education. Policy Enforcement. Policy Format. Security Policy Suggestions. Information Protection Team. Crisis Management Planning. Sources for Information Policies. Auditing and Intrusion Detection - What is an Audit. Operational Security Audits. System Security Auditing. Activity and Usage Auditing. Audit Mistakes. Deficiencies of Traditional Audit Techniques. Intrusion Detection. Intrusion Detection Systems. Host-Based Intrusion Detection Systems. Network-Based Intrusion Detection Systems. Knowledge-Based Intrusion Detection Systems. Statistical-Based Intrusion Detection Systems. Defense In-Depth Approach . Future Directions. Crisis Management Planning - Crisis Management. Disaster Recovery Planning. Computer Security Incident Response Plan. Browser Security - Cookie Files. Cache Files. Autocomplete.

Security policies are rules aimed at protecting the resources of an organisation from the risks associated with computer usage. Designing, implementing and maintaining security policies are all error prone and time consuming. We report on a tool that helps managing the security policies of an organisation. Security policies are formalised using first-order logic with equality and the unique names assumption, closely following the security policy language suggested in [1]. The tool includes a link to an automated theorem prover, Otter [2], and to a model finder, Mace [2], used to formally verify a set of formal security policies. It also includes a GUI and a number of links to read information and security policies from organisation databases and access control lists.

The common security policies of access control and resource management are based upon a central managing authority, called the system administration, that is ultimately responsible for the management of a usage policy. This management is usually done with some combination of mandatory access control and discretionary access control methods, where each user is granted (or denied) privileges and resources depending on the usage policies enforced at that particular system. System administration includes the management of system resources, user accounts, and user privileges. This security policy is typified by an operating system such as UNIX, and it introduces several dificulties when working in a distributed computing environment. This paper addresses distributed resource management and access control. It proposes a new version of the “Distributed Compartment Model” (DChf), first developed by Greenwald in his 1994 doctoral dissertation. DCM consists of two major components: Handles, a method for role based access control, and Distributed Compartments, a method allowing users to manage resources within a distributed system across administrative domain boundaries. This new version of DCM discussed in this paper is a refinement of the original formal security policy model. This paper concentrates on the history and background of the problems motivating the creation of DCM, describes the informal security policy, proposes some ezample scenan’os as to how DCM could be used, and concludes with a discussion of the results of this research.

Traditionally, a security policy is defined from an informal set of requirements, generally written using natural language. It is then difficult to appreciate the compatibility degree of the manually generated security policy with the informal requirements definition. The idea of this paper is to automate the process of deriving the formal security policy, using a more structured specification of the security objectives issued by the administrator of the information system to be secured. We chose the goal-oriented methodology KAOS to express the functional objectives, then based on the results of a risk analysis, we integrate the security objectives to the obtained KAOS framework. Finally, through a process of transformation applied to this structured security objectives specification, we automatically generate the corresponding security policy. This policy is consistent with the access control model OrBAC (Organization Access Control).

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.

Security policies define the secure and nonsecure states in a system. Historically, organizations have used natural language security policies as a means to guide their security implementation and communicate their security goals to their employees and customers. Formal policies must be developed to enable a policy to automatically drive the operation of enforcing devices either through configuration or direct application to a policy‐aware infrastructure. Ideally, the natural language security policy is at the top of a refinement hierarchy that eventually reaches the security implementation such that each level is derived from the next higher level. In reality there are large gaps in the refinement hierarchy with many organizations only having natural language security policy and the implementation configuration files. This disconnect between natural language policy and implementation configuration means that an organization is often operating outside the bounds of their policy. By running outside of their policy bounds an organization has a higher likelihood of operating in an exploitable insecure state.

The paper presents a policy-based approach to detect security violations by enforcing security policy at run-time for providing secure email service. As email service usage is increasing day by day, hackers or attackers are also playing a vital role to destruct email service and even to crash the email server. Due to this, it is a challenging task today to the system administrators to provide secure email service. In this paper, security policy is defined at operating system level, mail application level and network infrastructure level. A policy at system level specifies mandatory usage profile, usages of system sensitive resources such as file system objects, processes, system memory and inter process communication objects. Policies for mail application are defined with sensitive files/directories and parameters, which have impact in delivering a service. Policies for network are defined for controlling inbound and outbound traffic, specifying demilitarized zone, denying misuse of public IP and detecting suspicious network activity. The proposed system architecture supports the layered approach in policy enforcement, proactive defensive mechanism against security violations and scope for new policy discovery. The approach is prototyped on Linux-2.4.21-4 and have built rules for squirrel mail version 1.4.5 to detect security violations in a mail service at run-time.

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] In recent years, most scientific research in both academia and industry has become increasingly data-driven. According to market estimates, spending related to supporting scientific data-intensive research is expected to increase to $5.8 billion by 2018. Particularly for data-intensive scientific fields such as bioscience, or particle physics within academic environments, data storage/processing facilities, expert collaborators and specialized computing resources do not always reside within campus boundaries. With the growing trend of large collaborative partnerships involving researchers, expensive scientific instruments and high performance computing centers, experiments and simulations produce peta-bytes of data viz., Big Data, that is likely to be shared and analyzed by scientists in multi-disciplinary areas. Federated multi-cloud resource allocation for data-intensive application workflows is generally performed based on performance or quality of service (i.e., QSpecs) considerations. At the same time, end-to-end security requirements of these workflows across multiple domains are considered as an afterthought due to lack of standardized formalization methods. Consequently, diverse/heterogenous domain resource and security policies cause inter-conflicts between application's security and performance requirements that lead to sub-optimal resource allocations, especially when multiple such applications contend for limited resources. In this thesis, a joint performance and security-driven federated resource allocation scheme for data-intensive scientific applications is presented. In order to aid joint resource brokering among multi-cloud domains with diverse/heterogenous security postures, the definition and characterization of a data-intensive application's security specifications (i.e., SSpecs) is required. Next, an alignment technique inspired by Portunes Algebra to homogenize the various domain resource policies (i.e., RSpecs) along an application's workflow lifecycle stages is presented. Using such formalization and alignment, a near optimal cost-aware joint QSpecs-SSpecs-driven, RSpecs-compliant resource allocation algorithm for multi-cloud computing resource domain/location selection as well as network path selection, is proposed. We implement our security formalization, alignment, and allocation scheme as a framework, viz., "OnTimeURB" and validate it in a multi-cloud environment with exemplar data-intensive application workflows involving distributed computing and remote instrumentation use cases with different performance and security requirements.

The enforcement of security policies in outsourced environments is still an open challenge for policy-based systems. On the one hand, taking the appropriate security decision requires access to the policies. However, if such access is allowed in an untrusted environment then confidential information might be leaked by the policies. Current solutions are based on cryptographic operations that embed security policies with the security mechanism. Therefore, the enforcement of such policies is performed by allowing the authorised parties to access the appropriate keys. We believe that such solutions are far too rigid because they strictly intertwine authorisation policies with the enforcing mechanism. In this paper, we want to address the issue of enforcing security policies in an untrusted environment while protecting the policy confidentiality. Our solution ESPOON is aiming at providing a clear separation between security policies and the enforcement mechanism. However, the enforcement mechanism should learn as less as possible about both the policies and the requester attributes.

Delegation is a powerful concept in access control systems, which allows users to assign all or part of their permissions to other users. Several types of delegation models for role-based access control have been proposed so far. However, most existing works focus on the specification of delegation policies and there is very little work on the monitoring and enforcement of such policies at runtime. In this paper, we use a security approach combining formal methods and aspect-oriented programming for specifying and enforcing delegation policies. In our approach, delegation models and their characteristics are specified formally using TemporalZ, which is a combination of Z notation and temporal logic. Then, we verify the formal specification to ensure consistency using theorem proving. Finally, we generate automatically a set of aspects in the aspect-oriented language ALPHA from the TemporalZ specifications. These aspects enforce the specified delegation policies at runtime.

This paper describes an ongoing project on the specification and automatic implementation of functional secu- rity policies. We advocate a clear separation between functional behavior and functional security requirements. We propose a formal language to specify functional security policies. We are developing techniques by which a formal functional security policy can be automatically implemented. Hence, our approach is highly inspired from model-driven engineering. Furthermore, our formal language will enabled us to use model checking techniques to verify that a security policy satisfies desire d properties.

A security policy which includes the appropriate phases of implementation, enforcement, auditing and review is vital to protecting an organisations information security. This paper examined the information security policy of a government organisation in response to a number of perceived shortcomings. The specific issues identified relating to the organisations security policy as a result of this investigation were as follows: a culture of ignoring policies, minimal awareness of policies, minimal policy enforcement, policy updating and review ad hoc at best, policy framework, lengthy policy development and approval process, no compliance program, no formal non-compliance reporting and an apparent inconsistent enforcement across the whole of the organisation. In response to these identified issues, the following recommendations were made to improve the information security of the organisation: changing the organisations culture, creating an awareness mechanism for policies, improving the organisations culture, create an ICT policy awareness programme, review and re-write existing policies, policy enforcement, policy compliance, policy noncompliance reporting, policy updating and review, improve the policy development and approval process, policy compliance checking and uniform policy enforcement. Whilst it is also likely that a lack of governance contributed to these issues, this aspect was not addressed in this paper. It is hoped that timely implementation of the remedies presented here will increase the organisations information security.

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a new networking paradigm that virtualizes single network functions. NFV introduces several advantages compared to classical approaches, such as the dynamic provisioning of functionality or the implementation of scalable and reliable services (e.g., adding a new instance to support demands). NFV also allows the deployment of security controls, like firewalls or VPN gateways, as virtualized network functions. However, currently there is not an automatic way to select the security functions to enable and to configure the selected ones according to a set of user's security requirements. This paper presents a first approach towards the integration of network and security policy management into the NFV framework. By adding to the NFV architecture a new software component, the Policy Manager, we provide NFV with an easy and effective way for users to specify their security requirements and a process that hides all the details of the correct deployment and configuration of security functions. To perform its tasks, the Policy Manager uses policy refinement techniques.

The authors first describe some issues that arise from the interplay between the security requirements for an integrated project support environment (IPSE) for the development of a trusted system, and the security requirements of the trusted system itself. All of these issues derive from security policy and the modeling of security policy. A framework is then presented which allows security policies to be expressed in the context of the enterprise whose needs the trusted system is intended to serve. Finally some possible applications of the framework are used to indicate how security policies affect design decision-making, security policy conflict detection, and security risk evaluation. >

Security policies are enforced through the deployment of certain security functionalities within the applications. Applications can have different levels of security and thus each security policy is enforced by different security functionalities. Thus, the secure deployment of an application is not an easy task, being more complicated due to the existing gap between the specification of a security policy and the deployment, inside the application, of the security functionalities that are required to enforce that security policy. The main goal of this paper is to close this gap. This is done by using the paradigms of Software Product Lines and Aspect-Oriented Programming in order to: (1) link the security policies with the security functionalities, (2) generate a configuration of the security functionalities that fit a security policy, and (3) weave the selected security functionalities into an application. We qualitatively evaluate our approach, and discuss its benefits using a case study.