Building Secure Systems Research Articles

تعزيز الامن السيبراني من خلال اختبار الاختراق الفعال وفحص الثغرات

The number of computer network attacks today is increasing with the sophisticated attack tools and complicated methods hence, building secure systems is required. The demand for regular penetration testing and vulnerability scanning has become an urgent issue. This paper focuses on increase the security of the system resources being tested; Determine the weakness in the popular operating systems; Focus on methodologies and approaches to analyze the system for security that leads to protect the system against external threats. An experimental setup of a virtual penetration testing environment lab is created on a system using virtualization software. By using of the most powerful tools and techniques used today, a successful penetration testing and vulnerability scanning through three phases of processes are implemented. Eventually, the results of this process will help identify potential vulnerabilities in the operating systems and ways to patch them up. Keywords: Cybersecurity, penetration testing, vulnerability scanning tools.

A critical analysis of Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)

Zero Trust (ZT) has become a very hot approach for building secure systems, promoted by industry and government as a new way to produce systems with a high degree of security. ZT is based on not trusting any request for accessing resources. Because of the possibility of increasing the security of enterprise systems there has been a large amount of publication on different aspects of this strategy. It is then important to evaluate if its claims are true. We have used security patterns to design and evaluate security architectures and we apply here this method to analyze the expectations of this strategy. We relate the ideas behind ZT to the accumulated knowledge of security and attempt to answer some questions about the value and possibilities of this technology. In general, industry publications are vague about the technical aspects of these systems, ignore past security knowledge, and there are few reports describing actual experience building and using ZT architectures. Is Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) the ideal architecture to build secure systems? To obtain a deeper understanding of this architecture, we analyze its pattern structure and provide a sketch of its reference architecture built as an aggregation of security patterns. As any system architecture, regardless of the way it has been constructed, represents a system, we also consider its threats. Finally, we provide directions for research on this area.

Anchor: A Library for Building Secure Persistent Memory Systems

Cloud infrastructure is experiencing a shift towards disaggregated setups, especially with the introduction of the Compute Express Link (CXL) technology, where byte-addressable ersistent memory (PM) is becoming prominent. To fully utilize the potential of such devices, it is a necessity to access them through network stacks with equivalently high levels of performance (e.g., kernel-bypass, RDMA). While, these advancements are enabling the development of high-performance data management systems, their deployment on untrusted cloud environments also increases the security threats. To this end, we present Anchor, a library for building secure PM systems. Anchor provides strong hardware-assisted security properties, while ensuring crash consistency. Anchor exposes APIs for secure data management within the realms of the established PM programming model, targeting byte-addressable storage devices. Anchor leverages trusted execution environments (TEE) and extends their security properties on PM. While TEE's protected memory region provides a strong foundation for building secure systems, the key challenge is that: TEEs are fundamentally incompatible with PM and kernel-bypass networking approaches-in particular, TEEs are neither designed to protect untrusted non-volatile PM, nor the protected region can be accessed via an untrusted DMA connection. To overcome this challenge, we design a PM engine that ensures strong security properties for the PM data, using confidential and authenticated PM data structures, while preserving crash consistency through a secure logging protocol. We further extend the PM engine to provide remote PM data operations via a secure network stack and a formally verified remote attestation protocol to form an end-to-end system. Our evaluation shows that Anchor incurs reasonable overheads, while providing strong security properties.

Isolation without taxation: near-zero-cost transitions for WebAssembly and SFI

Software sandboxing or software-based fault isolation (SFI) is a lightweight approach to building secure systems out of untrusted components. Mozilla, for example, uses SFI to harden the Firefox browser by sandboxing third-party libraries, and companies like Fastly and Cloudflare use SFI to safely co-locate untrusted tenants on their edge clouds. While there have been significant efforts to optimize and verify SFI enforcement, context switching in SFI systems remains largely unexplored: almost all SFI systems use heavyweight transitions that are not only error-prone but incur significant performance overhead from saving, clearing, and restoring registers when context switching. We identify a set of zero-cost conditions that characterize when sandboxed code has sufficient structured to guarantee security via lightweight zero-cost transitions (simple function calls). We modify the Lucet Wasm compiler and its runtime to use zero-cost transitions, eliminating the undue performance tax on systems that rely on Lucet for sandboxing (e.g., we speed up image and font rendering in Firefox by up to 29.7% and 10% respectively). To remove the Lucet compiler and its correct implementation of the Wasm specification from the trusted computing base, we (1) develop a static binary verifier , VeriZero, which (in seconds) checks that binaries produced by Lucet satisfy our zero-cost conditions, and (2) prove the soundness of VeriZero by developing a logical relation that captures when a compiled Wasm function is semantically well-behaved with respect to our zero-cost conditions. Finally, we show that our model is useful beyond Wasm by describing a new, purpose-built SFI system, SegmentZero32, that uses x86 segmentation and LLVM with mostly off-the-shelf passes to enforce our zero-cost conditions; our prototype performs on-par with the state-of-the-art Native Client SFI system.

Provisioning, Authentication and Secure Communications for IoT Devices on FIWARE.

The increasing pervasiveness of the Internet of Things is resulting in a steady increase of cyberattacks in all of its facets. One of the most predominant attack vectors is related to its identity management, as it grants the ability to impersonate and circumvent current trust mechanisms. Given that identity is paramount to every security mechanism, such as authentication and access control, any vulnerable identity management mechanism undermines any attempt to build secure systems. While digital certificates are one of the most prevalent ways to establish identity and perform authentication, their provision at scale remains open. This provisioning process is usually an arduous task that encompasses device configuration, including identity and key provisioning. Human configuration errors are often the source of many security and privacy issues, so this task should be semi-autonomous to minimize erroneous configurations during this process. In this paper, we propose an identity management (IdM) and authentication method called YubiAuthIoT. The overall provisioning has an average runtime of 1137.8 ms . We integrate this method with the FIWARE platform, as a way to provision and authenticate IoT devices.

NB2M – Mechanism for Magnifying Micro Level Bugs for Secure Software System

People speak greatly about the electronic gadgets in the past, present and in future. Nobody spells that it is secure or insecure in terms of safety. More inventions are carrying into the society but in behind there are lot of pitfalls which could damage personal or organizations from upper level to ground level. It is very important to build secure systems to have safe usage of electronic gadgets. USA government is spending millions of dollars on secure data because in future their total dependency is on data. Technology is growing and the hackers (persons) who damage or steal our information and bank balances are similarly increase in parallel. Bug bounty hunting is the new technique that is enforced for finding the software security in the newly build software or year’s long existing software. New bug bounty methodology teaches us how to identify our software is secure or not and what the flaws or bugs in the software. NB2M mechanism gives the sources of cyber-attacks and study preserved producers for cyber-crimes. This process may be benefitted for organization as well as software professional who can gain lump sum dollars. It is better go for one to two years for bug bounty.

Cyber Security Crimes, Ethics and a Suggested Algorithm to Overcome Cyber-Physical Systems Problems (CybSec1)

Digital systems have changed our world and will continue to change it. Supportive government policy, a strong research base and history of industrial success place the benefits of an emerging digital society. Protecting benefits and minimizing risks requires reliable and robust cyber security, backed by a robust research and translation system. Trust is essential for growth and maintenance of participation in the digital community. Organizations gain trust by acting in a trustworthy way leading to building reliable and secure systems, treating people, their privacy and their data with respect, and providing reliable and understandable information to help people understand how safe they are. Research and revolution in industry and academia will continue to make important contributions to create flexible and reliable digital environment. Cyber Security has a main role in the field of information technology because securing information has become one of the greatest challenges today. When we think about the cyber security, the first thing that comes to our mind is “cyber crimes” which are increasing exponentially day by day. Many governments and firms are taking many measures to prevent these cybercrimes. Besides the various measures, cyber security remains a major concern. This paper intended to give a deep overview of the concepts and principles of cyber security that affect the safety and security in an international context. It mainly focuses on challenges faced by cyber security on the latest technologies and focuses also on introducing security types, cyber security techniques, cyber security ethics, trends that change the face of cyber security and finally attempting to solve one of the most serious cyber security crimes of violating privacy on the internet by improving the security of sensitive personal information (SPI) in Cyber-physical systems using a selected proposed algorithm that analyzes the user’s information resources and determines the valid data to be encrypted, then uses adaptive acquisition methods to collect the information and finally a new cryptographic method is used to complete SPI secure encryption according to acquisition results as described in details in Section 4.

Security Requirements for the Internet of Things: A Systematic Approach.

There has been a tremendous growth in the number of smart devices and their applications (e.g., smart sensors, wearable devices, smart phones, smart cars, etc.) in use in our everyday lives. This is accompanied by a new form of interconnection between the physical and digital worlds, commonly known as the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a paradigm shift, where anything and everything can be interconnected via a communication medium. In such systems, security is a prime concern and protecting the resources (e.g., applications and services) from unauthorized access needs appropriately designed security and privacy solutions. Building secure systems for the IoT can only be achieved through a thorough understanding of the particular needs of such systems. The state of the art is lacking a systematic analysis of the security requirements for the IoT. Motivated by this, in this paper, we present a systematic approach to understand the security requirements for the IoT, which will help designing secure IoT systems for the future. In developing these requirements, we provide different scenarios and outline potential threats and attacks within the IoT. Based on the characteristics of the IoT, we group the possible threats and attacks into five areas, namely communications, device/services, users, mobility and integration of resources. We then examine the existing security requirements for IoT presented in the literature and detail our approach for security requirements for the IoT. We argue that by adhering to the proposed requirements, an IoT system can be designed securely by achieving much of the promised benefits of scalability, usability, connectivity, and flexibility in a practical and comprehensive manner.

МЕТОДОЛОГІЯ ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ ГАРАНТОЗДАТНОСТІ ІНФОРМАЦІЙНО-КЕРУЮЧИХ СИСТЕМ З ВИКОРИСТАННЯМ БАГАТОЦІЛЬОВИХ СТРАТЕГІЙ ОБСЛУГОВУВАННЯ

The article considers the methodology of ensuring the dependability of information and control systems using multi-purpose maintenance strategies. The relevance of research is due to the need to ensure the functioning of dependable information and control systems in the face of changes in requirements, environmental parameters, and the manifestation of unspecified failures of their components. The methodology is presented at the system level as a combination of the concept of multi-purpose maintenance, as well as the principles of taking into account changes in the information and control system and environment during the life cycle; comprehensive consideration of different types of failures, and the effects of change; multi-purpose maintenance and combines a set of new models and methods for determining the parameters of dependability information and control systems and the choice of parameters for their maintenance procedures. The proposed concept of multi-purpose maintenance is obtained by developing the Fon-Neumann paradigm and is formulated as a concept of building reliable and secure systems from insufficiently dependable components and multi-purpose maintenance on combined strategies in changing conditions and environment. The scope of the proposed concept is applicable in cases where the principles of von-Neumann do not allow building a viable system due to economic, temporal, or other reasons. In this case, the use of principles, methods, and models that are conceptual, extends to information and control systems built using maintained components and system multi-purpose service strategies. The proposed principle of taking into account changes involves the expansion of the classical control circuit of the fault-tolerant system, which response to the fault occurrence as errors and failures. The principle of comprehensive consideration of different types of failures and the effects of change is a continuation of the principles of unity and connection during the procedures of system analysis. It is also a logical continuation of the facet arrangement of fault types and chains of causal relationships from faults and defects to faults, failures, and errors. Within the framework of the proposed methodology, multi-purpose maintenance strategies, a set of options for goals, types, processes, properties, and parameters of information and control systems have been developed, which reduces model uncertainty and justifies practical measures to ensure dependability at different stages of the life cycle.

Understanding Software Security from Design to Deployment

Analyzing, implementing and maintaining security requirements of software-intensive systems and achieving truly secure software requires planning for security from ground up, and continuously assuring that security is maintained across the software's lifecycle and even after deployment when software evolves. Given the increasing complexity of software systems, new application domains, dynamic and often critical operating conditions, the distributed nature of many software systems, and fast moving markets which put pressure on software vendors, building secure systems from ground up becomes even more challenging. Security-related issues have previously been targeted in software engineering sub-communities and venues. In the second edition of the International Workshop on Security from Design to Deployment (SEAD) at the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 2020, we aimed to bring the research and practitioner communities of requirements engineers, security experts, architects, developers, and testers together to identify foundations, and challenges, and to formulate solutions related to automating the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of secure software systems.

A Methodology for Security Classification applied to Smart Grid Infrastructures

The electricity grid is an important critical infrastructure that is undergoing major changes, due to the Internet of Things (IoT) and renewable energy, heading towards the smart grid. However, besides the many good promises of the smart grid, such as better peak control, cheaper maintenance, and more open energy markets, there are many new security threats evolving, especially from the IoT side, and also from the diversification of the systems and practices that the smart grid brings. We thus see the need for more light-weight and dynamic methods for conducting security analyses of systems applicable at (re)design time, intended to help system engineers build secure systems from the start. As a consequence, the methods should also look more at the functionalities (exposure/protection) of the system than at the possible attacks.In this paper we propose a methodology called Smart Grid Security Classification (SGSC) developed for complex systems like the smart grid, focusing on the specifics of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems. Our methodology is built upon the Agence nationale de la sécurité des systémes d’information (ANSSI) standard methodology for security classification of general Information and Communication Systems (ICS). Analyses performed following our method easily translate into ANSSI valid reports. Our SGSC is related to methods of risk analysis with the difference that our classification method has the purpose to assign a system to a security class, based on (combinations of) scores given to the various exposure aspects of the system and the respective protection mechanisms implemented; without looking at attackers. There are multiple uses of SGSC, such as offering indications to decision-makers about the security aspects of a system and for deciding purchasing strategies, for regulatory bodies to certify various complex infrastructure systems, but also for system/security designers to make easier choices of correct functionalities that would allow to reach a desired level of security. Particularly useful for smart grid systems is the discussion and mapping that we do of the SGSC methodology to a complex AMI infrastructure description derived from real deployments being done in ongoing Norwegian smart grid upgrades.

Security Evaluation Methods in Trust Infrastructure Based on Engineering and Economics

The modern world runs on data. It is one of the most valuable commodities and many of our day to day activities are based on generating or using this data. The convenience of our world, in which a single device brings us internet searches, shopping lists, online purchases, texts and phone calls is designed to create, store and use data to make life easier and more and more of our daily activities will be conducted online despite security concerns. For example, online purchasing and banking require guarantees that customers data and identities are verifiable and secure. The act of voting is also now moving to being completed online. While this would surely encourage more people to vote by making the process available on your smartphone, the security and integrity of the system is a concern. Is the system hackable? Can it be shutdown by malicious actors, causing chaos on voting day? How can we be sure that the person casting the vote online is in fact that person or that they are not being coerced to cast a certain ballot. These are just a few examples of the breadth of the information security field and the foresight required to build secure systems. Kanta Matsuura, who is a Professor at the Institute of Industrial Science in the University of Tokyo, has been working in this area since the early 2000s. For him, these are issues that the public needs to understand so they can trust in the security tools being developed, such as cryptography and blockchain technologies. 'Traditionally in cryptography, there is a well-known principle proposed by Auguste Kerckhoffs that says a cryptographic system should be secure even if everything about the system, except the secret key, is public knowledge and available to attackers,' says Matsuura. 'To build such a system requires a careful evaluation of these infrastructures before they are designed, known as security by design.' Matsuura therefore believes that stakeholders be well informed regarding the methods used in the construction of the system and the methods used in the security evaluation of the system. 'This introduces scientific rigor to the discipline, and contributes to real-world activities such as standardisation, product validation, risk communication, and so on,' he says

SYSTEMS SECURITY ENGINEERING: WHOSE JOB IS IT ANYWAY?

ABSTRACTThis article delivers a look at current and evolving policy, guidance, and standards surrounding security activities in the systems engineering lifecycle. Emphasis is placed on systems security engineering (SSE) and how application of systems engineering concepts and processes in an agile manner (agile systems engineering) throughout the lifecycle is the way to deal with the dynamic and diverse world of cyber threats to a system (Dove 2014). This paper is a follow‐on to “Response to Cyber Security Demands for Agility” (Nejib‐Beyer 2014) published in the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) INSIGHT in 2014. The focus of that research was bringing attention to cyber security and the importance of other disciplines towards contributing to secure systems. Since that time many of these domains have further developed their own standards, processes, and guidance in the area of cyber security. What we require now is a way to take these domain‐focused concepts and integrate them into and across a systems lifecycle. The best way to achieve this is as part of the systems engineering function. Designing and building secure systems requires a seamless integration of security into systems engineering processes and agile methodologies adopted to constantly revisit, reevaluate, and re‐design as part of a risk management process. The framework that will be discussed in this paper will focus on taking currently evolving guidance in SSE and breaking that down into products and tools for systems engineers to easily determine the relationship and value between SSE and systems engineering. In addition, quick reference guides will further enhance and enable successful development and integration of SSE artifacts into systems engineering artifacts. One of the companion pieces needed in the existing SSE documentation is a mapping of work products/artifacts generated during the lifecycle/technical processes and the responsible and contributing parties. Critical to the success of the new guidance, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800‐160, Systems Security Engineering, is a clear accountability and acceptance of all disciplines on their contributions and influence towards developing a secure system. We present an SSE roles and responsibilities framework concept for consideration. The framework is an implementation tool to be used along with existing guidance in the area of SSE and systems engineering to clearly demonstrate that program protection is not the responsibility of any one person or discipline, it is the responsibility of an entire team of individuals planning, developing, deploying, operating & maintaining (O&M), and retiring a system. SSE is the “glue” that binds all of this together during the systems engineering lifecycle to enhance system security.

Practical Lattice-Based Digital Signature Schemes

Digital signatures are an important primitive for building secure systems and are used in most real-world security protocols. However, almost all popular signature schemes are either based on the factoring assumption (RSA) or the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem (DSA/ECDSA). In the case of classical cryptanalytic advances or progress on the development of quantum computers, the hardness of these closely related problems might be seriously weakened. A potential alternative approach is the construction of signature schemes based on the hardness of certain lattice problems that are assumed to be intractable by quantum computers. Due to significant research advancements in recent years, lattice-based schemes have now become practical and appear to be a very viable alternative to number-theoretic cryptography. In this article, we focus on recent developments and the current state of the art in lattice-based digital signatures and provide a comprehensive survey discussing signature schemes with respect to practicality. Additionally, we discuss future research areas that are essential for the continued development of lattice-based cryptography.

Building secure systems with LIO (demo)

LIO is a decentralized information flow control (DIFC) system, implemented in Haskell. In this demo proposal, we give an overview of the LIO library and show how LIO can be used to build secure systems. In particular, we show how to specify high-level security policies in the context of web applications, and describe how LIO automatically enforces these policies even in the presence of untrusted code.

A Survey Of Sql Injection Countermeasures

SQL injection has become a predominant type of attacks that target web applications. It allows attackers to obtain unauthorized access to the back-end database to change the intended application-generated SQL queries. Researchers have proposed various solutions to address SQL injection problems. However, many of them have limitations and often cannot address all kinds of injection problems. What’s more, new types of SQL injection attacks have arisen over the years. To better counter these attacks, identifying and understanding existing countermeasures are very important. In this research , I had surveyed existing techniques against SQL injection attacks and analyzed their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, I identified techniques for building secure systems and applied them to my applications and database system, and illustrated how they were performed and the effect of them.

Thinking operationally [IT security

Security is a complex problem. Building secure systems involves many aspects; from development life cycles to code audits, developer training, deployment, and operations, there's a lot to keep track of. However, with the current state of enterprise security, thinking about security from an operational perspective has become increasingly important.

Eliciting security requirements and tracing them to design: an integration of Common Criteria, heuristics, and UMLsec

Building secure systems is difficult for many reasons. This paper deals with two of the main challenges: (i) the lack of security expertise in development teams and (ii) the inadequacy of existing methodologies to support developers who are not security experts. The security standard ISO 14508 Common Criteria (CC) together with secure design techniques such as UMLsec can provide the security expertise, knowledge, and guidelines that are needed. However, security expertise and guidelines are not stated explicitly in the CC. They are rather phrased in security domain terminology and difficult to understand for developers. This means that some general security and secure design expertise are required to fully take advantage of the CC and UMLsec. In addition, there is the problem of tracing security requirements and objectives into solution design, which is needed for proof of requirements fulfilment. This paper describes a security requirements engineering methodology called SecReq. SecReq combines three techniques: the CC, the heuristic requirements editor HeRA, and UMLsec. SecReq makes systematic use of the security engineering knowledge contained in the CC and UMLsec, as well as security-related heuristics in the HeRA tool. The integrated SecReq method supports early detection of security-related issues (HeRA), their systematic refinement guided by the CC, and the ability to trace security requirements into UML design models. A feedback loop helps reusing experience within SecReq and turns the approach into an iterative process for the secure system life-cycle, also in the presence of system evolution.

Risk homeostasis and network security [Editor's Note

This Special Issue is dedicated to the topic of network intrusion detection. The wide use of many varieties of intrusion detection systems reveals a certain degree of acceptance that, despite our best intentions for building secure systems, there is always enough opportunity for attacks, possibly exploiting weaknesses of the very systems we thought to be secure. Moreover, even though attacks usually follow patterns that can be subsequently used to detect them, they also happen to be the product of intelligent adversaries - humans. The ability to orchestrate ever more elaborate attacks, exhibiting patterns not seen before, means that we expect an IDS to be ready to discern new patterns found to be conceivably detrimental to the security requirements of a system. Intrusion detection systems are sometimes criticized as doing too little too late. However, there are cases where even a late response is better than no response at all.

Learning by Failing (and Fixing)

Unfortunately, students can graduate with a software engineering degree without learning anything about building secure systems. However, for the past two years at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, a software security course has been giving students the theoretical foundation and practical experience necessary to start comprehending software security issues.