Security policy integration and conflict reconciliation for data integration across data sharing services in ubiquitous computing environments

Today IPSec virtual private networks are widely used to establish secure network connections between a pair of hosts, between a pair of security gateways, or between a security gateway and a host. The complexity and variety of rules in an IPSec policy may result in a combination of rules which not only do not provide the required security services, but also compromise the security of communication. Efficiency has not been a major concern for existing IPSec policy conflict detection methods since they process the IPSec rules in an offline way. These methods could be inefficient in dynamic conditions that rules are being updated frequently. The performance of the conflict detection is important in environments where network administrator needs to frequently add or delete rules to existing policy and also he/she needs to know of the possible conflicts which may arise due to policy changes. In this paper we extend the formal model proposed by Hamed [6] for IPSec policy analysis and propose novel and efficient algorithms which can dynamically detect and also resolve the policy conflicts. The results of the implementation and evaluation of our proposed algorithms show significantly better performance for detection and resolution of IPSec policy conflicts, comparing to current work.

Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles<br><br>"A Scenario-Based Test Case Generation Framework for Security Policies"<br>by Chen Yan and Wu Dan<br>International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Security, 2009. CIS '09 December 2009, pp. 489-493<br><br>After careful and considered review of the content and authorship of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE's Publication Principles.<br><br>This paper contains significant portions of original text from the paper cited below. The original text was copied without attribution (including appropriate references to the original author(s) and/or paper title) and without permission.<br><br>Due to the nature of this violation, reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper, and future references should be made to the following article:<br><br>"Model-based Testing Using Scenarios and Event-B Refinements"<br>by Qaisar A. Malik, Johan Lilius and Linas Laibinis<br>Methods, Models and Tools for Fault-Tolerance, Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, Springer, March 2009, pp. 177-195<br><br> <br/> Security policy system is critical to the security sensitive implementation systems. To increase confidence in the correctness of the security policies, policy developers can conduct policy testing to ensure security policies are correctly implemented in these systems. In this paper we present a novel framework for security policy testing. The framework takes the security policy as a support for the secure operation of the functional systems and seizes the dynamic characteristic of the security policies which change with the refinement of functional systems. The testing framework is model based and includes three parts. They are security policy integration; refinement based testing scenario acquisition and risk-based testing organization. The framework covers all elements for the model-based testing and provides a comprehensive solution for the security policy testing.

Chapter 45 - Detection of Conflicts in Security Policies

Network security polices are essential elements in Internet security devices that provide traffic filtering, integrity, confidentiality, and authentication. Network security perimeter devices such as firewalls, IPSec, and IDS/IPS devices operate based on locally configured policies. However, configuring network security policies remains a complex and error-prone task due to rule dependency semantics and the interaction between policies in the network. This complexity is likely to increase as the network size increases. A successful deployment of a network security system requires global analysis of policy configurations of all network security devices in order to avoid policy conflicts and inconsistency. Policy conflicts may cause serious security breaches and network vulnerability such as blocking legitimate traffic, permitting unwanted traffic, and insecure data transmission. This article presents a comprehensive classification of security policy conflicts that might potentially exist in a single security device (intrapolicy conflicts) or between different network devices (interpolicy conflicts) in enterprise networks. We also show the high probability of creating such conflicts even by expert system administrators and network practitioners.

Traditionally, the definition and the maintenance of security and access control policies has been the exclusive task of system administrators or security officers. In modern distributed and heterogeneous systems, there exist the need to allow different stakeholders to create and edit their security and access control preferences. In order to solve this problem two main challenges need to be met. First, authoring tools with different user interfaces should be designed and adapted to meet domain background and the degree of expertise of each stakeholder. For example, policy authoring tools for a patient or a doctor should be user friendly and not contain any technical details, while those for a security administrators can be more sophisticated, containing more details. Second, conflicts that can arise among security policies defined by different stakeholders must be considered by these authoring tools on runtime. Furthermore, warnings and assisting messages must be provided to help defining correct policies and to avoid potential security risks. Towards meeting these challenges, we propose an authoring framework for security policies. This framework enables building authoring tools that take into consideration the views of different stakeholders.KeywordsSecurity policyEHRPolicy authoringUsabilityModel-driven engineering

Traditional access control mechanisms prevent illegal access by controlling access right before executing an action; they belong to a class of a priori security solutions and, from this point of view, they have some limitations, like inflexibility in unanticipated circumstances. By contrast, a posteriori mechanisms enforce policies not by preventing unauthorized access, but rather by deterring it. Such access control needs evidence to prove violations. Evidence is derived from one or several log records, which trace each user's actions. Efficiency of violation detection mostly depends on the compliance of log records with the access control policy. In order to develop an efficient method for finding these violations, we propose restructuring log records according to a security policy model. We illustrate our methodology by applying it to the healthcare domain, taking care of the IHE (Integrating the healthcare enterprise) framework, particularly its basic security profile, ATNA (Audit Trail and Node Authentication). This profile defines log records established on the analysis of common health practice scenarios. We analyze and establish how ATNA log records can be refined in order to be integrated into an a posteriori access and usage control process, based on an expressive and contextual security policy like the OrBAC policy.

With the emergence of the Internet, collaborative computing has become more feasible than ever. Organizations can share valuable information among each other. However, certain users should only access certain portions of source data. The CHAOS (Configurable Heterogeneous Active Object System) project addresses security issues that arise when information is shared among collaborating enterprises. It provides a framework for integrating security policy specification with source data maintenance. In CHAOS, security policies are incorporated into the data objects as active nodes to form active objects. When active objects are queried, their active nodes are dynamically loaded by the active security mediator and executed. The active nodes, based on the security policy incorporated, can locate and operate on all the elements within the active object, modifying the content as well as the structure of the object. A set of API’s is provided to construct more complex security policies, which can be tailored for different enterprise settings. This model moves the responsibility of security to the source data provider, rather than through a central authority. The design provides enterprises with a flexible mechanism to protect sensitive information in a collaborative computing environment.KeywordsAccess ControlSecurity PolicyActive NodeActive ObjectAccess Control PolicyThese 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.

Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen (ZIB) is the flagship journal of the German International Relations community. According to a poll amongst German political scientists across various sub-fields conducted in 2009 it is also considered the best German-language journal in Political Science at large. ZIB publishes articles that make original as well as theoretically and methodically reflected contributions to the study of international relations. The thematic spectrum includes the entire range of IR, including IR theory, foreign policy analysis, international institutions, peace and conflict resolution, security policy, European integration, North-South relations, development policy, and international economic relations. The high quality of articles that are published in ZIB is ensured through double blind peer review. ZIB was the first journal in German Political Science to introduce such a process. Since its founding in 1994 ZIB has greatly contributed to the professionalization of the German IR-community and can be considered a key source for thematic stimuli on theoretical, methodological and empirical levels at the edge of contemporary IR research. Website: www.zib.nomos.de

Security policies have different components; firewall, active directory, and IDS are some examples of these components. Enforcement of network security policies to low level security mechanisms faces some essential difficulties. Consistency, verification, and maintenance are the major ones of these difficulties. One approach to overcome these difficulties is to automate the process of translation of high level security policy into low level security mechanisms. This paper introduces a framework of an automation process that translates a high level security policy into low level security mechanisms. The framework is described in terms of three phases; in the first phase all network assets are categorized according to their roles in the network security and relations between them are identified to constitute the network security model. This proposed model extends the organization based access control (OrBAC) model to include not only access control policy but also some other administrative security policies like auditing policy. Besides, it enables matching of each rule of the high level security policy with the corresponding ones of the low level security policy. Through the second phase, the high level security policy is mapped into the network security model. The second phase could be considered as a translation of the high level security policy into an intermediate model level. Finally, the intermediate model level is translated automatically into low level security mechanism. The paper illustrates the applicability of proposed approach through an application example.

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.

Access control is the process of mediating every request to resources and data maintained by a system and determining whether the request should be granted or denied. The access control decision is enforced by a mechanism implementing regulations established by a security policy. Different access control policies can be applied, corresponding to different criteria for defining what should, and what should not, be allowed, and, in some sense, to different definitions of what ensuring security means. In this chapter we investigate the basic concepts behind access control design and enforcement, and point out different security requirements that may need to be taken into consideration. We discuss several access control policies, and models formalizing them, that have been proposed in the literature or that are currently under investigation.

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.

The paper analyzes the European Community/ European Union experience in the Western Balkans in the period from 1990 onwards in different context in order to assess different mechanisms which the European Union has gained with building the Common Foreign and Security Policy and within the Enlargement Policy in the process of conflict prevention and conflict resolution. Additionally, the paper makes an assessment of the EU’s involvement in the conflict prevention and conflict resolution in the Balkans after the Stabilization and Association Process was launched in 1999. The authors argue that in the case of the military conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, when the European Community was confronted with serious and hard security issues at the very beginning of creating its Common Foreign and Security Policy and in a period of time when the region was not part of the enlargement process, the Community and the Union afterwards proved to be extremely ineffective. In the second part, through three case studies, the paper demonstrate that with the combined use of CFSP mechanisms and SAP, positive examples of the EU acting as a provider of peaceful dispute settlement in the Western Balkans have been established.

XACML has become the de facto standard for expressing access control policy. Similarly, XML security standards, such as XML encryption and XML digital signature, have been widely deployed for protecting the confidentiality, authenticity and integrity of digital information. In this paper we present a framework of using XACML and XML security to support secure, embedded and fine-grained access control policy. The basic idea is to extend XACML such that access control policy can be embedded with the digital content in the same XACML document. The original content can be further divided into multiple parts, each of which is encapsulated by its own access control policy. The integrated XACML policy and content document is further protected using XML encryption and digital signature. This framework and associated security methods are designed to facilitate the protection, management and sharing of sensitive information.