Resolve Security Policies Conflicts Through Semantics Matching Alignment

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for enhancing security policy management in the Grid.Design/methodology/approachThe Grid security policy reconciliation problem is presented. A generic view on the security policy notion is adopted and the security policy ontology notion is introduced and used.FindingsIn the course of this work it was found that, in order to enhance security policy management in the Grid, Grid entities should have the ability to negotiate their security policies. It was also found that, in order to achieve security policy negotiation, effective security policy semantics manipulation towards security policy reconciliation is needed. Finally, it was established, through the use of an example, that if appropriate means are used for security policy reconciliation then incompatible security policy representations can be transformed into compatible ones.Research limitations/implicationsResearch limitations stem from the adoption of a generic view on the security policy notion and the selection of identification and authentication security policies as the focal point of the proposed framework. Research implications include the possibility of examining how existing security policy reconciliation models can be incorporated in this generic framework. The possibility of investigating how such a framework can lead to a security policy knowledge management tool for Grid administrators is also demonstrated.Practical implicationsPractical implications of this work include the establishment of a common framework for security information exchange between Grid entities.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a framework for enhancing security policy management in the Grid. The proposed framework can be used by researchers as a reference and by security experts in order to reduce ambiguity concerning the interpretation of security policies expressed in different forms, by negotiating Grid entities.

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.

Amid growing concerns about security and privacy, and their impact on decision-making, researchers have sought to understand the reasons behind users’ seemingly risky behaviour in disregarding security advice. In this study, we delve into the perceptions of security experts on end users’ threat models and their cybersecurity practices and habits. This research explores the perceptions of security and privacy experts regarding end users’ threat models and their behaviours in relation to cybersecurity. A survey was conducted with 55 experts, including 27 females and 28 males, to gain insights into end users’ habits, practices, and feelings from the perspective of security experts. The study reveals that end-users express moderate concern about privacy and security while carrying out their daily tasks. However, security experts believe that end-users tend to be passive towards organisational security policies, and their lack of knowledge about these policies which may lead to negative feelings. Additionally, experts perceive that end-users may be unaware of security measures, have difficulties understanding security concepts, and are at high risk of falling victim to phishing attacks by opening attachments and clicking on unknown links.

18 - Windows Server 2003 Security Management

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is well understood that the increasing importance of open distributed systems and the growing number of services that utilise them has given rise to the need for effective distributed systems management [190]. Furthermore, it has also become increasingly difficult to build management systems that can cope with the increasing size and complexity of current open distributed systems [192, 196]. Recently, a number of distributed object-based computing environments, such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) [167] and the Telecommunication Intelligent Network Architecture (TINA) [152], have been developed that aim to support interoperability between domains in large open distributed systems, where components may appear and disappear dynamically at run-time. As a direct result of the interoperability promoted by such architectures, the complexity of security and management policies has increased greatly due in part to the requirement to support both mutual transparency and individual autonomy between domains [18], and also because of the necessity to cope with the coexistence of multiple, potentially inconsistent, security and management policies. In this thesis, an approach to the modelling of policy and a formal temporal logic based specification of a policy language has been developed that are suitable for supporting the requirements of large open distributed systems. Use of both the concepts defined in the policy model and a formal policy language has enabled the precise specification of what constitutes conflict in policy-based management systems. Furthermore, the development of methods and algorithms that support the systematic dynamic detection and resolution of policy-based conflicts in large open distributed environments have been defined.

It is our great pleasure to welcome you at the 3rd International Conference on Security of Information and Networks -- SIN 2010, organized in technical cooperation with the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC). The conference, similar to SIN 2009 and SIN 2007, covers practically all aspects of security of information and networks. The SIN 2009 Conference had such sections as "Security Assessment, Policies, Educational Programs", "Security and Integrity Management and Models", "Cryptography, Security and Networks", "Access Control and Security Assurance", and "Attacks, Intrusion Detection". Based on accepted submissions, the following sections are presented at SIN 2010: Security Assessment, Policies, Privacy, and Educational Programs (12 papers);Management and Models of Security and Integrity (9 papers);Cryptography, Security, and Networks (10 papers);Attacks and Intrusion Detection (7 papers). We received 73 submissions of which only a small portion was accepted based on at least two independent reviews. At times three, even four, reviews were secured before a decision could be made. Among all the submissions, 31 were accepted as full papers (42%), 6 as short (8%), and 1 as a position statement (1%). The authors of the submitted papers hail from China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, North Cyprus, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and USA. The papers of "Security Assessment, Policies, Privacy, and Educational Programs" section consider such topics as security standards and regulations, privacy, anonymity, educational issues, and digital forensics. "Management and Models of Security and Integrity" section papers consider various security management policies, models and architectures. "Cryptography, Security, and Networks" section features papers on cryptographic algorithms and protocols, as well as networks security. And finally, "Attacks and Intrusion Detection" section combines the papers discussing the detection and prevention of intrusions. SIN 2010 Conference gives researchers and practitioners a unique opportunity to share their perspectives with others interested in the various aspects of security of information and networks. We hope that these proceedings will serve as a valuable reference for security researchers and developers.

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.

Essentially all commercial computer systems development and deployment have been driven by concerns for time-to-market, novel features, and cost, with little if any concern for assurance, reliability, or the avoidance of system security and networked vulnerabilities. Retrofitted products for the new connected world expose new vulnerabilities, because the environment changes. Security features of an existing product may not address new risks, and new security policies take effect. New features introduce unforeseen interactions between various components. Software and systems currently are related to risks under contract law rather than any more demanding liability laws. The contracts are typically inequitable, with purchasers assuming all liabilities, despite the practical impossibility of their assessing the security, reliability, or survivability characteristics of the products. Indeed, most software products come with an anti-warranty; the producer warrants nothing, and customers assume all liabilities. There is a serious lack of understanding among developers and development managers that security and survivability are different from features. Self-promoted and self-assigned “security experts” often lead to security features that are promised, but poorly conceived and poorly understood. It has been the industry’s advantage to position “security” as an added feature to other systems and computing complexes, rather than primarily a characteristic of thoughtful architecture, careful design, and meticulous engineering, coding, testing, and operation. Security does not result from modules added after the fact; it must be engineered in from the beginning. The CERT/CC database contains numerous vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and password sniffing that are often consequences of basic system architecture and design, some of which cannot easily be retrofitted. Products are shipped with many features, but assurance is at best paid only with lip-service as part of the vendor’s marketing campaign. Lack of commercial preference regarding security favors feature-laden software and frequent shipping schedules; too often, it is more important to ship a product with promised features in the commercial world. Although this may seem to be the failure or ignorance of the industry, these features are often requested by customers who don’t have an in-depth understanding of security. If a vendor can’t deliver in time or doesn’t offer a feature for sound security reasons, the customer finds another vendor that can. The industry is not interested in research and development without payoffs. As long as the customer takes the risks, there is a great incentive to offer “nifty” features, even if these features increase the vulnerability to compromise. Evaluation of a product against a Common Criteria protection profile, for example, is not on the list of most customers. The feature-dominated production ignores security experts’ warnings, which become the first sacrifice in development organizations. Similar sacrifice is carried out by customers demanding functionality. Although gaining more interest, cryptography, computer security, and survivability are not widespread. Security issues covered in most operating system and software engineering courses can be improved. It may not be possible to expand the existing courses and squeeze more concepts within the same time frame. Instead, separate computer security courses might be added as is already practiced by some universities. But, one way or the other, security and software engineering need to be thoroughly integrated into the curriculum. Inadequate testing of features and their myriad interactions generally relegates testing to a final screen. Hardware designers have long implemented design-for-testability rule sets and supporting integral test hardware (which may occupy more than 5% of a chip). Testing engineers should be involved at the inception of development to make sure issues relating to testability and reliability are properly addressed. The software and systems industry has been allowed to develop without substantial legal oversight, under the assumption its customers were sophisticated and could manage their risk exposure appropriately. Unfortunately, even sophisticated customers cannot know their security exposure. Under such conditions, liability law may be held to override unjust contract disclaimers. If the industry will not clean up its act, it must expect the tort bar to do so.

This document describes the problem space and solution requirements for developing an IP Security Policy (IPSP) configuration and management framework. The IPSP architecture provides a scalable, decentralized framework for managing, discovering and negotiating the host and network security policies that govern access, authorization, authentication, confidentiality, data integrity, and other IP Security properties. This document highlights such architectural components and presents their functional requirements.

The new transnational security threats, such as terrorism, challenge traditional methods of European Union cooperation. In the era of threats to inter-state peace the Union engendered security through ‘passive’ integration in the form of the abolition of European borders. Today the EU is increasingly given the responsibility for creating security and safety, both externally and internally, by the means of ‘active’ security instruments such as the European Security and Defence Policy and the Solidarity Declaration of 2004. The challenge is that these policies and principles require a vision beyond that of a free market, common threat perceptions and effective coordination of the crisis management capacity of EU member states. This article argues that the practical needs following this qualitative step, such as the strategic engagement of new security actors and levels of EU governance on a long term basis, are very similar to the ones that the Open Method of Coordination has attempted to resolve in EU cooperation in the field of welfare policies. It suggests that this method should be used also to strengthen the Union security policy and crisis management capacity.