Security in E‐Services and Applications

[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.

Given the wide distribution of software and its current growth, security is inevitable, and software systems have become more complex. To avoid the complexity and protect valuable assets of software systems, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of security requirement engineering (SRE) and security assurance advise incorporating security requirements early in software development life cycle (SDLC). Nowadays, security requirements specification and identification are an active research area for ensuring the effectiveness of software systems. However, security requirement identification is a challenging task due to sheer numbers of threats and attacks to a software system. Previous researchers have identified different SRE techniques, each looking at the same problem from a different perspective. Therefore, a literature review conducted on SRE techniques. We compared and analyzed different SRE techniques to find the most suitable SRE techniques for researchers and practitioners. Selected SRE techniques compared based on various parameters, such as different attributes, requirement elicitation, requirement analysis, project size, and integration of standards. The literature also indicates that among SRE approaches, security quality requirements engineering (SQAURE), secure tropos, security requirements engineering process (SREP), and comprehensive lightweight application security process (CLASP) are the most used SRE approaches that focus on activities such as threats, security requirements identification, and security objectives identification. Unfortunately, several SRE approaches fail to explicitly integrate the security standard and security assurance perspective. Three questions developed for this study: Question 1 is based on comparison of existing SRE approaches, Question 2 is based on SRE with security requirements elicitation and analysis, and Question 3 highlights the incorporation of security requirements assurance by SRE approaches implicitly or explicitly. The researcher must work with the developer to easily adopt SRE approaches to elicit and ensure security requirements for the software system.

This chapter presents a quantitative security risk management cybersecurity measure namely the Mean Failure Cost (MFC). We illustrate it to quantify the security of an e-Learning application while taking account of its respective stakeholders, security requirements, architectural components and the complete list of security threats. Moreover, in the mean time, security requirements are considered as appropriate mechanisms for preventing, detecting and recovering security attacks, for this reason an extension of the MFC measure is presented in order to detect the most critical security requirements to support the quantitative decision-making. Our focus is widespread to offer a diagnostic of the non secure system's problems and a depth insight interpretation about critical requirements, critical threats and critical components. This extension is beneficial and opens a wide range of possibilities for further economics based analysis. Also this chapter highlights the security measures for controlling e-Learning security problems regarding the most critical security requirements.

Security must be a primary concern when engineering Future Internet (FI) systems and applications. In order to achieve secure solutions, we need to capture security requirements early in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Whereas the security community has traditionally focused on providing tools and mechanisms to capture and express hard security requirements (e.g. confidentiality), little attention has been paid to other important requirements such as trust and reputation. We argue that these soft security requirements can leverage security in open, distributed, heterogeneous systems and applications and that they must be included in an early phase as part of the development process. In this paper we propose a UML extension for specifying trust and reputation requirements, and we apply it to an eHealth case study.

User access control provides the permission to impose different access privileges for different types of authenticated users for accessing the sensing information directly from the sensor nodes inside a wireless sensor network (WSN). Until now, there have been ample number of user access control schemes proposed in the literature, and each scheme has its own merits and demerits. In this paper, we identify all the functionality features and security requirements, which must be satisfied for an ideal user access control scheme. We present and discuss the recently proposed important user access control schemes available so far in the literature. We critically analyse the energy, communication, computational overheads requirement, functionality and security analysis of the existing schemes. Further, we perform the formal security analysis of existing schemes using the widely-accepted automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool. All the existing schemes have some limitations. Hence, we feel that there is a strong need to design an ideal efficient user access control scheme in future, which should meet all the security requirements and achieve all the functionality features.

We propose a new dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards, which it is based on one-way hash function, ElGamal’s public key cryptosystem and nonce. The scheme achieves the following security requirements: 1) users can choose and change their password freely, 2) mutual authentication between the user and the server, 3) the user and the server establish a session key after successful authentication process, 4) the server does not maintain a verification table, 5) the login request message does not contain the user’s identity, and 6) the authentication phase does not require time-synchronization, making it more secure than previous schemes. In order to verify the security characteristics of our protocol, we have modelled and analysed the proposal using High-level Protocol Specification Language (HLPSL) and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. The results demonstrate that our protocol achieves more security requirements than previous works.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) applications are digital versions of paper-based patient's health information. They are increasingly adopted to improved quality in healthcare, such as convenient access to histories of patient medication and clinic visits, easier follow up of patient treatment plans, and precise medical decision-making process. EHR applications are guided by measures of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Furthermore, Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology (HIT) certification criteria for usability of EHRs. A compliance checking approach attempts to identify whether or not an adopted EHR application meets the security and privacy criteria. There is no study in the literature to understand whether traditional static code analysis-based vulnerability discovered can assist in compliance checking of regulatory requirements of HIPAA and ONC. This paper attempts to address this issue. We identify security and privacy requirements for HIPAA technical requirements, and identify a subset of ONC criteria related to security and privacy, and then evaluate EHR applications for security vulnerabilities. Finally propose mitigation of security issues towards better compliance and to help practitioners reuse open source tools towards certification compliance.

Android apps are essential to contemporary existence, driving mission-critical industries such as government, finance, and healthcare. Yet, their prevalence exposes them to security risks, and their exposure to vulnerabilities represents serious threats to confidential data and mission-critical services. Identification and elimination of these vulnerabilities at the development stage are important since remediation after deployment is expensive and more difficult. Static analysis provides a proactive solution by analyzing code for vulnerabilities without running it, allowing developers to detect and correct security flaws early. This project suggests an end-to-end framework for static analysis of Android apps to identify and prevent vulnerabilities. The framework combines manual and automated code reviews, configuration analysis, and third-party dependency checks. Major aspects include source code review for insecure code practices, tool-based automated vulnerability detection (e.g., MobSF, SonarQube, Android Lint), and comprehensive analysis of configuration files (e.g., AndroidManifest.xml, build.gradle) and dependencies. Detected vulnerabilities are documented, ranked, and resolved through direct remediation recommendations to have a secure app. The solution strengthens application security by enabling early vulnerability discovery, promoting secure coding, and increasing developer awareness of frequent security pitfalls. The framework provides a common and scalable way to protect Android apps to ensure they satisfy a critical infrastructure sectors’ security requirements.

Since the Internet of Things (IoT) will be entwined with everything we use in our daily life, the consequence of security flaws escalates. Smart objects will govern most of the home appliances and car engines yielding potential disaster scenarios. In this context, successful attacks could lead to chaos and scary scenarios (www.darkreading.com). Unprotected personal information may expose sensitive and embarrassing data to the public and attacks may threaten not only our computers and smart devices, but our intimacy and perhaps our lives too. Because persons and objects will be bonded with each other, user consent becomes critical. Therefore, thing, object, and user Identity will be the focus of future IoT security solutions, yielding a Trust, Security, and Privacy (TSP) paradigm, which may constitute the Achilles' heel of IoT. While security issues are quite straightforward, mainly from background knowledge, privacy issues are far more complex. Privacy constitutes a rather challenging task, even for the m...

We investigate privacy-preserving Public-Key Infrastructures (PKIs) with additional security, privacy, and performance requirements meant to support vehicular networks. While conventional PKIs are a cornerstone for identity management in certain security applications, they do not offer the privacy properties that vehicular networks demand. Over the last few years, there have been efforts to generalize conventional PKIs to meet these new privacy and security demands. One particular example is the class of multiple certificate PKIs where each vehicle is given multiple short-lived and anonymous certificates that can function as credentials until the vehicle is due for, say, the next inspection or dealership visit. While such PKIs offer attractive security and privacy properties, achieving acceptable performance has remained an open problem thus questioning their practicality.In this paper, we formally define and investigate the efficient certificate revocation list (CRL) search problem for multiple certificate PKIs, which asks whether it is possible to efficiently test CRL membership of a given certificate in the same order of computational complexity as in conventional PKIs (that is, by a simple and fast binary search over the set of revoked PKI members). Any solution to this problem is of particular interest when it does not introduce unacceptable compromises on other important properties such as security and privacy. We start by formally defining vehicular networks and a number of security, privacy and performance requirements for them. Then we demonstrate that for PKIs based on general classes of efficient algorithms, containing binary search over totally ordered sets and approximate nearest neighbor search over metric spaces, a solution to the efficient CRL search problem can be used to violate privacy. Finally, we present and analyze new solutions that simultaneously solve the efficient cRL search problem and satisfy privacy requirements by allowing all vehicles to locally (i.e., with minimal help from the CA) and consistently (i.e., with the same results across all vehicles) manage their CRLs. Using these ideas, we can maintain security and privacy properties while reducing the CRL membership testing time to logarithmic in the number of revoked vehicles, which is essentially the same performance that one obtains with conventional PKIs where privacy is not required.

This paper discusses the design and implementation for supporting customized security services in active networks using active networking principles. The customized security services support is based on a secure node architecture that includes an active node operating system security API, an active security guardian, and quality of protection provisions. The support of highly customized security services permits active nodes to satisfy the application-specific dynamic security and protection requirements. It associates quality of protection with network software and application security. Applications can dynamically select the suitable security configurations and services at each active routing node, based on their security and performance requirements. The secure node architecture, together with the support of dynamically customized security services, can provide a fundamental base for securing the active network infrastructure and active applications.

Wireless sensor nodes are extremely useful in different security and surveillance related applications which may be compromised with the existence of coverage-holes. Coverage-hole is the area in a wireless sensor network (WSN) where sensing or transmitting of data is not achievable and therefore, detecting such region is a prominent research topic in WSN. Subsequent to hole-detection, another significant task is to detect the boundary nodesoutlining the coverage-holes. In this paper, we have gone through different research articles describing the various boundary-detection techniques those have been recommended to facilitate hole-detection inside the sensor network. On the basis of the literature review, we have done categorization of the boundary-detection methods, their characteristics, pros & cons and their effect on sensor network’s performance for better understanding and future reference.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), comprising of tiny nodes with limited energy, computational and communication resources, are being widely used in various application areas ranging from pollution and weather monitoring to military. Even though every application may not require data to be exchanged in a secure manner, few WSN applications may have certain security requirements. The data is encrypted by a sender and sent over the wireless links and the same is decrypted at the receiver. To meet this purpose, symmetric key cryptographic (SKC) algorithms may be used. Such SKC primitives require keys to be made available before carrying out the data transfer between the nodes. Alternately, Public Key Cryptographic techniques, such as RSA algorithm can be considered. Even though, RSA is a popular algorithm providing good security level, it is computationally intensive involving large key sizes. The RSA can not be used in WSNs, as the nodes have limited resources. Presently, it is infeasible to implement the RSA algorithm using any of the WSN nodes commercially available. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), another public key cryptographic (PKC) algorithm providing same level of security with smaller key size requirements, can be used as an alternative in order to provide security in WSN applications. ECC encryption and decryption use domain parameters, which includes the Generator point to be published. In most of the outdoor WSN applications, the deployment of the nodes is random and the nodes could be captured and an attacker could launch man-in-middle (MIM) attack, and break the public key thereby leading to security breach in the network. A technique to overcome such an attack is proposed in this work and the same is compared with two other similar approaches.

System security is an increasingly important design criterion for many embedded systems. These systems are often portable and more easily attacked than traditional desktop and server computing systems. Key requirements for system security include defenses against physical attacks and lightweight support in terms of area and power consumption. Our new approach to embedded system security focuses on the protection of application loading and secure application execution. During secure application loading, an encrypted application is transferred from on-board flash memory to external double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory (DDR-SDRAM) via a microprocessor. Following application loading, the core-based security technique provides both confidentiality and authentication for data stored in a microprocessor's system memory. The benefits of our low overhead memory protection approaches are demonstrated using four applications implemented in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) in an embedded system prototyping platform. Each application requires a collection of tasks with varying memory security requirements. The configurable security core implemented on-chip inside the FPGA with the microprocessor allows for different memory security policies for different application tasks. An average memory saving of 63% is achieved for the four applications versus a uniform security approach. The lightweight circuitry included to support application loading from flash memory adds about 10% FPGA area overhead to the processor-based system and main memory security hardware.

In Industry 4.0 independent entities shall inter-operate to allow flexible and customized production. To assure the parties that individual components are secured to inter-operate, we investigate automated standard compliance. The standard compliance is defined based on given sets of security and safety requirements from which are derived measurable indicator points. Those reflect configurations of systems recommended by security, safety or legally relevant standards and guidelines, which help to demonstrate the state of compliance. We propose in this paper an initial approach to automate such assessment when components are inter-operating with each other by using a monitoring and standard compliance verification framework. This will assure the parties that services or devices within their organizations operate in a secure and standard compliant way, without compromising the underlying infrastructure.