Corporate security solutions for BYOD: A novel user-centric and self-adaptive system

Abstract

Companies and particularly their Chief Security Officers (CSOs) want to ensure that their Security Policies are followed, but this becomes a difficult goal to achieve at the point employees are able to use, or bring, their personal devices at work, in a practice that has been named “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD). Since this BYOD philosophy is being adopted by many companies everyday, a number of solutions have appeared in the market so that it can be implemented in a secure way and comply with the Security Policies mentioned above. In this paper we propose a taxonomy to classify the features of BYOD systems. This taxonomy is used to present an overview of BYOD security solutions.Also, we describe a novel, adaptive and free software system named MUSES (Multi-platform Usable Endpoint Security), able to securely manage BYOD environments. MUSES has been developed to cope with security issues with regard to enterprise security policies, but as a user-centric tool. It considers users’ behavior in order to adapt, improve, and even increase the defined set of security rules. To do this, the system applies Machine Learning and Computational Intelligence techniques, being also able to predict future security incidences produced by these users. The MUSES framework, which has released its first prototype in early 2015, is compared with the most relevant solutions offered by other companies to deal with the same issues, remarking the advantages that our system offers with respect to them.