Secure Global Collaboration Among Critical Infrastructures

ABSTRACT

Information sharing and collaboration on critical infrastructure protection efforts are major drivers of interest for national security, law enforcement, first responders, and environmental regulators. Critical infrastructure protection information, as stated in the U.S. Patriot Act, are “systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health, or any combination of those matters.” Due to the unique, blended nature among customers, suppliers, and contractors within the aerospace and defense industry, a secure method for collaboration is a critical issue that requires remediation.     

An architecture for automatically developing secure OLAP applications from models

ContextDecision makers query enterprise information stored in Data Warehouses (DW) by using tools (such as On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools) which use specific views or cubes from the corporate DW or Data Marts, based on the multidimensional modeling. Since the information managed is critical, security constraints have to be correctly established in order to avoid unauthorized accesses.ObjectiveIn previous work we have defined a Model-Driven based approach for developing a secure DWs repository by following a relational approach. Nevertheless, is also important to define security constraints in the metadata layer that connects the DWs repository with the OLAP tools, that is, over the same multidimensional structures that final users manage. This paper defines a proposal to develop secure OLAP applications and incorporates it into our previous approach.MethodOur proposal is composed of models and transformations. Our models have been defined using the extension capabilities from UML (conceptual model) and extending the OLAP package of CWM with security (logical model). Transformations have been defined by using a graphical notation and implemented into QVT and MOFScript. Finally, this proposal has been evaluated through case studies.ResultsA complete MDA architecture for developing secure OLAP applications. The main contributions of this paper are: improvement of a UML profile for conceptual modeling; definition of a logical metamodel for OLAP applications; and definition and implementation of transformations from conceptual to logical models, and from logical models to the secure implementation into a specific OLAP tool (SSAS).ConclusionOur proposal allows us to develop secure OLAP applications, providing a complete MDA architecture composed of several security models and automatic transformations towards the final secure implementation. Security aspects are early identified and fitted into a most robust solution that provides us a better information assurance and a saving of time in maintenance.     

Assuring Data Security Integrity at Ford Motor Company

Abstract

Security auditing methods have not changed markedly from those first developed for the stand-alone computer environments of the 1960s. These methods were adequate for their time, but modern information system technology has made auditing computer security a much more imposing problem. There are numerous reasons for this. Personal computers have placed powerful tools for exploration and hacking onto everyone's desk. Networks have revolutionized the exchange of information, but they have also provided a direct path for hackers to attack and compromise critical computer assets. Even more threatening, employees and contractors can often readily gain unrestricted access to even the most sensitive information simply because standards for protection have not been designed or implemented. In this environment, bookkeeping-based auditing methods not only fall short, but can create a misleading impression that security is under control.     

iMeasure Security (iMS): A Framework for Quantitative Assessment of Security Measures and its Impacts

ABSTRACT

As business systems are getting interconnected, the importance of security is growing at an unprecedented pace. To protect information, strong security measures need to be implemented and continuously updated and monitored to ensure their promise against present and future security breaches. However, the growth of networked systems and the increasing availability of sophisticated hacking tools make the task of securing business systems challenging. To enhance the security strength and to justify any investment in security-related products, it becomes mandatory to assess the security measures in place and estimate the level of security provided by them. The existing standards to certify the strength of a security system are qualitative, lack consideration of the countermeasures and do not consider the impact of security breaches. Consequently, there is a need for an alternative approach to estimate the security strength of a system in a quantitative manner. This paper aims to provide an extensible framework called iMeasure Security (iMS) that quantifies the security strength of an enterprise system by considering the countermeasures deployed in its network, analyzes the business impact of the security breaches, and provides insights as to how the level of security can be improved from current levels.     

Security Through Deception

ABSTRACT

For each layer of information security there is a number of techniques and tools that can be used to ensure information superiority. Indeed some experts would argue that you cannot have the former without the latter. In today's technological & interconnected world, however, information superiority is very hard to achieve and almost impossible to maintain. This paper will argue that the art of deception is a reliable and cost effective technique that can assure the security of an infrastructure. The paper will conclude by presenting a technical solution of the above statement.     

Integrating Information Security through Total Quality Management

Abstract

As companies begin to increase their electronic presence, digitizing increasingly more of their private and sensitive information, the need for information security becomes mandatory. While the relationship between technology and business functionality expands, information security has safeguarded the information the business needs to survive. Organizations are increasingly aware of information security issues and are constantly seeking control measures. Information security studies predominantly focused on the presence of information security controls rather than the quality of those controls. Security, as an element of quality, must be addressed in the development, implementation, and monitoring of strategy and policy. In order to ensure that adequate controls are established for information systems, quality assurance and information systems auditors should maintain a close working relationship. Total Quality Management is mandatory in the successful application and proliferation of information security controls.     

NetGlean: A Methodology for Distributed Network Security Scanning

Network vulnerability analysis tools today do not provide a complete security awareness solution. Currently, network administrators utilize multiple analysis tools in succession or randomly in a patchwork fashion that provides only temporary assurance. This paper introduces NetGlean as a methodology for distributed network security scanning with a holistic approach to network analysis. NetGlean uses new and existing techniques in a continual, autonomous, evolutionary manner to provide powerful real-time and historical views of large and complex networks. This paper introduces the methodology and describes one implementation NetGleanIP, a scanner for IP and converged networks.Gavin W. Manes is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Information Security and the University of Tulsa. His research interests are information assurance, digital forensics, telecommunications security, and critical infrastructure protection.Dominic Schulte graduate with his Masters of Computer Science from the University of Tulsa in May 2003. Currently he works as an information security professional.Seth Guenther graduate with his Masters of Computer Science from the University of Tulsa in May 2003. Currently he works as an information security professional.Sujeet Shenoi is the F.P.Walter Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma. His research interests are in information assurance, digital forensics, critical infrastructure protection, and intelligent control.     

Using argumentation to evaluate software assurance standards

ContextMany people and organisations rely upon software safety and security standards to provide confidence in software intensive systems. For example, people rely upon the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation to establish justified and sufficient confidence that an evaluated information technology product’s contributions to security threats and threat management are acceptable. Is this standard suitable for this purpose?ObjectiveWe propose a method for assessing whether conformance with a software safety or security standard is sufficient to support a conclusion such as adequate safety or security. We hypothesise that our method is feasible and capable of revealing interesting issues with the proposed use of the assessed standard.MethodThe software safety and security standards with which we are concerned require evidence and discuss the objectives of that evidence. Our method is to capture a standard’s evidence and objectives as an argument supporting the desired conclusion and to subject this argument to logical criticism. We have evaluated our method by case study application to the Common Criteria standard.ResultsWe were able to capture and criticise an argument from the Common Criteria standard. Review revealed 121 issues with the analysed use of the standard. These range from vagueness in its text to failure to require evidence that would substantially increase confidence in the security of evaluated software.ConclusionOur method was feasible and revealed interesting issues with using a Common Criteria evaluation to support a conclusion of adequate software security. Considering the structure of similar assurance standards, we see no reason to believe that our method will not prove similarly valuable in other applications.     

Development of Secure XML Data Warehouses with QVT

ContextData warehouses are systems which integrate heterogeneous sources to support the decision making process. Data from the Web is becoming increasingly more important as sources for these systems, which has motivated the extensive use of XML to facilitate data and metadata interchange among heterogeneous data sources from the Web and the data warehouse. However, the business information that data warehouses manage is highly sensitive and must, therefore, be carefully protected. Security is thus a key issue in the design of data warehouses, regardless of the implementation technology. It is important to note that the idiosyncrasy of the unstructured and semi-structured data requires particular security rules that have been specifically tailored to these systems in order to permit their particularities to be captured correctly. Unfortunately, although security issues have been considered in the development of traditional data warehouses, current research lacks approaches with which to consider security when the target platform is based on XML technology.ObjectiveWe shall focus on defining transformations to obtain a secure XML Schema from the conceptual multidimensional model of a data warehouse.MethodWe have first defined the rationale behind the transformation rules and how they have been developed in natural language, and we have then established them clearly and formally by using the QVT language. Finally, in order to validate our proposal we have carried out a case study.ResultsWe have proposed an approach for the model driven development of Secure XML Data Warehouses, defining a set of QVT transformation rules.ConclusionThe main benefit of our proposal is that it is possible to model security requirements together with the conceptual model of the data warehouse during the early stages of a project, and automatically obtain the corresponding implementation for XML.     

Managing Your Security Future

ABSTRACT

Information technology organizations within most corporations are spending significant time and resources securing IT infrastructure. This increased need for security is driven by a number of factors. These factors include increased dependency on the Internet, financial and legal liability, protection of personal identity information and sensitive corporate data, increased numbers and age of legacy systems with limited vendor support, deploying complex systems, and new regulations governing corporate transactions. There a number of technologies on the market today that can mitigate most of these security factors. However, managers in IT organizations need to identify potential future threats and security technologies to assess and potentially mitigate risk through the deployment of those technologies. This article investigates three areas critical to the successful deployment and securing of information technology.     

Coordination Tools for MAS Development and Deployment

One of the most critical issues in the engineering of multi-agent systems (MAS) is the inadequacy of the available tools for MAS development and deployment. As we assume interaction as a first-class issue in MAS, tools are particularly required to monitor and debug inter-agents aspects, such as interaction protocols, coordination policies, social norms, and environment constraints. Since we claim that the definition of such tools is a basic research issue, in this paper we aim to identify the main requirements for development and deployment tools within an effective agent infrastructure. Focusing on agent interaction aspects, we take tuple-based coordination infrastructures--in particular the TuCSoN technology and tools--as our reference, and discuss the role of tools in a simple case study: the development and deployment of a well-known agent interaction protocol, the Contract Net.     

A Framework for Unified Network Security Management: Identifying and Tracking Security Threats on Converged Networks

A comprehensive network security management system must coordinate detection and scanning tools for converged networks; derive fully-integrated attack and network models; perform vulnerability and multi-stage attack analysis; support large-scale attack visualization; and possibly orchestrate strategic responses to unwarranted actions that cross network boundaries. We present an architecture that embodies these principles. The unified network security management system described in this paper gleans data from a suite of detection tools for various networking domains. Aggregate real-time network data supplies a comprehensive modeling framework used for further analysis, correlation, and visualization. The resulting system not only provides network administrators with a heads-up cockpit display of their entire network, it also supports guided response and predictive capabilities for multi-stage attacks in converged networks.Jerald Dawkins is Founder and Chief Scientist of Digital Enterprise Security Associates, LLC located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His academic and professional endeavors have provided him with a background in computer security, attack management, risk analysis, and software engineering. He received his B.S. (Computer Science) degree from Fort Lewis College in 1999 and his M.S. and Ph.D. (Computer Science) from the University of Tulsa in 2003 and 2005, respectively.Kevin Clark is a Masters student at the University of Tulsa. He has been involved with research focusing on Security Risk Metrics, Automated Attack Generation and Analysis, and Attack Visualization.Gavin Manes is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Information Security and the University of Tulsa. His research interests are information assurance, digital forensics, telecommunications security, and critical infrastructure protection.     

Information assurance the West Point way

At the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, we approach the topic of protecting and defending information systems as a matter of national security. The time has long passed where we could consider cyberattacks as merely a nuisance; the threat from a cyberattack is very real. Our national information infrastructure is not just essential to the USA economy; it is a life-critical system. Presidential Decision Directive 63 (which called for a national effort to assure vulnerable and interconnected infrastructure security, such as telecommunications, finance, energy, transportation, and essential government services) officially recognizes this, and numerous reports have validated it. As military academy educators, our duty is to provide an education that empowers our graduates with the skills needed to protect the many critical information systems that the military uses.     

Active Security—A proactive approach for computer security systems

Computer systems and especially networking environments are growing and changing very rapidly. Such growth introduces major security risks, as current computer and networking security components are not able to dynamically adopt themselves for the changing needs. Especially the growth of the Internet and electronic commerce have made it necessary to have centralized security policies in place which are enforced by a distributed environment. ‘Active Security’ is the result of a research and development project, introducing a new approach for implementing security systems, being able to automatically respond to new security threats. The focus of this work is encompassing a security infrastructure where multiple components including intrusion detection systems, vulnerability assessment scanners, firewalls and other security devices are able to communicate and respond to changing security threats. Design and implementation of Active Security is based on a public key infrastructure using digital certificates for providing authenticated communication. A number of sites on the Internet have participated during the pilot phase of Active Security protecting their networks. The United States patent titled ‘Active Firewall System and Methodology’ is pending for this architecture.     

Incorporating HIPAA Security Requirements into an Enterprise Security Program

Abstract

HIPAA Security regulations are forcing many organizations to secure electronic individually identifiable health information. Some side benefits of such an undertaking are improving information management processes, creating a foundation for compliance with other regulations, and maintaining their level of readiness within a security program that aligns with the HIPAA security risk- based approach. This provides effective, enterprisewide risk management.     

入侵检测系统在电子商务中的应用研究

Internet技术的不断发展,电子商务在全球经济一体化的进程中越来越得到重视,成为人们关注的焦点。在电子商务活动中,安全性是一个至关重要的问题,必须要保证信息交流的绝对安全。本文通过对电子商务及其安全进行分析,以及对目前的入侵检测系统进行了分析和研究,提出了一种主动的分布式入侵检测系统,并将其应用在电子商务当中。     

Issues in Client/Server Security

Abstract

One of the most common concerns voiced at the various security conferences and security associations around the country is: “How do we get our management to understand the importance of information security?” Individuals who have been unable to secure the attention or financial commitment from the senior leadership of their respective organizations typically voice these concerns. The question is usually accompanied by frustration as a result of multiple attempts to obtain budget, only to be faced with flat budgets, cuts to the current expenditure levels, or the elimination of separate information security budgets. Each organization has different values, principles, and strategies to move the business forward. This article explores some techniques for building management commitment through the implementation of a successful information security council. Security councils provide an excellent mechanism for establishing buy-in across middle management, and subsequently senior management and the end users of the organization.     

Holistic security requirements analysis for socio-technical systems

Security has been a growing concern for large organizations, especially financial and governmental institutions, as security breaches in the systems they depend on have repeatedly resulted in billions of dollars in losses per year, and this cost is on the rise. A primary reason for these breaches is that the systems in question are “socio-technical” a mix of people, processes, technology, and infrastructure. However, such systems are designed in a piecemeal rather than a holistic fashion, leaving parts of the system vulnerable. To tackle this problem, we propose a three-layer security analysis framework consisting of a social layer (business processes, social actors), a software layer (software applications that support the social layer), and an infrastructure layer (physical and technological infrastructure). In our proposal, global security requirements lead to local security requirements, cutting across conceptual layers, and upper-layer security analysis influences analysis at lower layers. Moreover, we propose a set of analytical methods and a systematic process that together drive security requirements analysis across the three layers. To support analysis, we have defined corresponding inference rules that (semi-)automate the analysis, helping to deal with system complexity. A prototype tool has been implemented to support analysts throughout the analysis process. Moreover, we have performed a case study on a real-world smart grid scenario to validate our approach.     

Securing Access in Network Operations — Emerging Tools for Simplifying a Carrier's Network Security Administration

ABSTRACT

Security administrators at the global communications service providers have traditionally experienced difficulties in enforcing access security policies in their network operations. It has not, however, been for lack of trying. Whether security breaches have been intentional (hackers) or inadvertent (well-intentioned network operators misusing commands), network outages and intrusions due to an inability to enforce access security policies have been a serious problem, often resulting in tens of millions of dollars in foregone revenues while impairing a service provider's ability to provide continuous service to its customers. This article reviews the challenges that have existed to date for security administrators while exploring a 4-step approach, using newly available security administration automation tools, to overcome these challenges for network operating environments that involve many hundreds of network operators administering tens of thousands of network elements in a global network.