Security threats to critical infrastructure: the human factor

In the twenty-first century, globalisation made corporate boundaries invisible and difficult to manage. This new macroeconomic transformation caused by globalisation introduced new challenges for critical infrastructure management. By replacing manual tasks with automated decision making and sophisticated technology, no doubt we feel much more secure than half a century ago. As the technological advancement takes root, so does the maturity of security threats. It is common that today’s critical infrastructures are operated by non-computer experts, e.g. nurses in health care, soldiers in military or firefighters in emergency services. In such challenging applications, protecting against insider attacks is often neither feasible nor economically possible, but these threats can be managed using suitable risk management strategies. Security technologies, e.g. firewalls, help protect data assets and computer systems against unauthorised entry. However, one area which is often largely ignored is the human factor of system security. Through social engineering techniques, malicious attackers are able to breach organisational security via people interactions. This paper presents a security awareness training framework, which can be used to train operators of critical infrastructure, on various social engineering security threats such as spear phishing, baiting, pretexting, among others.     

Optimizing Management Functions in Distributed Systems

With the increased availability and complexity of distributed systems comes a greater need for solutions to assist in the management of distributed systems. Despite the significant contributions made towards the development of management tools that monitor and control distributed systems, little has been done to address issues such as optimizing the execution of management functions with respect to system and management requirements. This paper presents a management optimization model in which management agents and managed objects are efficiently configured on the basis of a set of system and management requirements. We illustrate our model and describe its implementation through a Branch- and Bound-based algorithm and a web-based interface. The latter enables users to specify the requirements used by the optimization algorithm to determine efficient management configurations. It also includes an XML-based interface through which management agents can be started independent of the underlying platforms. Performance characteristics of the proposed algorithm as well as experimental results to illustrate the validity of the model are also described.     

Deep and shallow binding: The assignment operation

Programming languages which use dynamic identification for free variables (i.e., non-local references) are generally implemented with a deep or shallow binding variable access strategy. In this paper, variable access through the binding environment is assumed to be desirable. Given this assumption, it is demonstrated that the act of assigning values to variables may yield unexpected results for some of the binding strategies when functional arguments and results are used. A number of variations of deep and shallow binding strategies are examined along with the modifications necessary to implement the assignment operation in the expected manner.     

Implementing ray tracing with octrees and neighbor finding

A ray tracing implementation is described that is based on an octree representation of a scene. Rays are traced through the scene by calculating the blocks through which they pass. This calculation is performed in a bottom-up manner through the use of neighbor finding. The octrees are assumed to be implemented by a pointer representation.     

Approximating CSG trees of moving objects

A discussion of the relationship between two solid representation schemes is presented: CSG trees and recursive spatial subdivision exemplified by the bintree, a generalization of the quadtree and octree. Detailed algorithms are developed and analyzed for evaluating CSG trees by bintree conversion. These techniques are shown to enable the addition of the time dimension and motion to the approximate analysis of CSG trees. This facilitates the solution of problems such as static and dynamic interference detection. A technique for projecting across any dimension is also shown. For “well-behaved” CSG trees the execution time of the conversion algorithm is directly related to the spatial complexity of the object represented by the CSG tree (i.e., as the resolution increases, it is asymptotically proportional to the number of bintree nodes and does not depend on the size or form of the CSG tree representation). The set of well-behaved CSG trees include all trees that define multidimensional polyhedra in a manner that does not give rise to tangential intersections at CSG tree nodes. This is an expanded version of a paper titled “Bintrees, CSG Trees, and Time” which appeared inProceedings of the SIGGRAPH '85 Conference, San Francisco (July 1985), pp. 121–130. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants DCR-83-02118 and IRI-88-02457 and in part by the Finnish Academy Deceased on August 5, 1989