Final Year IEEE Project 2013-2014 - Dependable and Secure Computing Project Title and Abstract

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ETPL SORT: A Self-Organizing Trust Model for Peer-to-Peer Systems DSC-001 Abstract: Open nature of peer-to-peer systems exposes them to malicious activity. Building trust relationships among peers can mitigate attacks of malicious peers. This paper presents distributed algorithms that enable a peer to reason about trustworthiness of other peers based on past interactions and recommendations. Peers create their own trust network in their proximity by using local information available and do not try to learn global trust information. Two contexts of trust, service, and recommendation contexts, are defined to measure trustworthiness in providing services and giving recommendations. Interactions and recommendations are evaluated based on importance, recentness, and peer satisfaction parameters. Additionally, recommender's trustworthiness and confidence about a recommendation are considered while evaluating recommendations. Simulation experiments on a file sharing application show that the proposed model can mitigate attacks on 16 different malicious behavior models. In the experiments, good peers were able to form trust relationships in their proximity and isolate malicious peers. ETPL To lie or to comply: Defending against Flood Attacks in Disruption Tolerant Networks DSC-002 Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) utilize the mobility of nodes and the opportunistic contacts among nodes for data communications. Due to the limitation in network resources such as contact opportunity and buffer space, DTNs are vulnerable to flood attacks in which attackers send as many packets or packet replicas as possible to the network, in order to deplete or overuse the limited network resources. In this paper, we employ rate limiting to defend against flood attacks in DTNs, such that each node has a limit over the number of packets that it can generate in each time interval and a limit over the number of replicas that it can generate for each packet. We propose a distributed scheme to detect if a node has violated its rate limits. To address the challenge that it is difficult to count all the packets or replicas sent by a node due to lack of communication infrastructure, our detection adopts claim-carry-and-check: each node itself counts the number of packets or replicas that it has sent and claims the count to other nodes; the receiving nodes carry the claims when they move, and cross-check if their carried claims are inconsistent when they contact. The claim structure uses the pigeonhole principle to guarantee that an attacker will make inconsistent claims which may lead to detection. We provide rigorous analysis on the probability of detection, and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme with extensive tracedriven simulations. ETPL Discovery and Resolution of Anomalies in Web Access Control Policies DSC-003 Emerging computing technologies such as Web services, service-oriented architecture, and cloud computing has enabled us to perform business services more efficiently and effectively. However, we still suffer from unintended security leakages by unauthorized actions in business services while providing more convenient services to Internet users through such a cutting-edge technological growth. Furthermore, designing and managing Web access control policies are often error-prone due to the lack of effective analysis mechanisms and tools. In this paper, we represent an innovative policyanomaly analysis approach for Web access control policies, focusing on XACML (eXtensible AccessControl Markup Language) policy. We introduce a policy-based segmentation technique to accurately identify policy anomalies and derive effective anomaly resolutions, along with an intuitive visualization representation of analysis results. We also discuss a proof-of-concept implementation of our method called XAnalyzer and demonstrate how our approach can efficiently discover and resolve policyanomalies.

ETPL Location-Aware and Safer Cards: Enhancing RFID Security and Privacy via Location DSC-004 Sensing Abstract: In this paper, we report on a new approach for enhancing security and privacy in certain RFID applications whereby location or location-related information (such as speed) can serve as a legitimate access context. Examples of these applications include access cards, toll cards, credit cards, and other payment tokens. We show that location awareness can be used by both tags and back-end servers for defending against unauthorized reading and relay attacks on RFID systems. On the tag side, we design a location-aware selective unlocking mechanism using which tags can selectively respond to reader interrogations rather than doing so promiscuously. On the server side, we design a location-aware secure transaction verification scheme that allows a bank server to decide whether to approve or deny a payment transaction and detect a specific type of relay attack involving malicious readers. The premise of our work is a current technological advancement that can enable RFID tags with low-cost location (GPS) sensing capabilities. Unlike prior research on this subject, our defenses do not rely on auxiliary devices or require any explicit user involvement. ETPL Malware Clearance for Secure Commitment of OS-Level Virtual Machines DSC-005 Abstract: A virtual machine(VM) can be simply created upon use and disposed upon the completion of the tasks or the detection of error. The disadvantage of this approach is that if there is no malicious activity, the user has to redo all of the work in her actual workspace since there is no easy way to commit (i.e., merge) only the benign updates within the VM back to the host environment. In this work, we develop a VM commitment system called Secom to automatically eliminate malicious state changes when merging the contents of an OS-level VM to the host. Secom consists of three steps: grouping state changes into clusters, distinguishing between benign and malicious clusters, and committing benign clusters. Secom has three novel features. First, instead of relying on a huge volume of log data, it leverages OS-level information flow and malware behavior information to recognize malicious changes. As a result, the approach imposes a smaller performance overhead. Second, different from existing intrusion detection and recovery systems that detect compromised OS objects one by one, Secom classifies objects into clusters and then identifies malicious objects on a cluster by cluster basis. Third, to reduce the false-positive rate when identifying malicious clusters, it simultaneously considers two malware behaviors that are of different types and the origin of the processes that exhibit these behaviors, rather than considers a single behavior alone as done by existing malware detection methods. We have successfully implemented Secom on the feather-weight virtual machine system, a Windows-based OSlevel virtualization system. Experiments show that the prototype can effectively eliminate malicious state changes while committing a VM with small performance degradation. Moreover, compared with the commercial antimalware tools, the Secom prototype has a smaller number of false negatives and thus can more thoroughly clean up malware side effects. In addition, the number of false positiv- s of the Secom prototype is also lower than that achieved by the online behavior-based approach of the commercial tools. ETPL Securing Class Initialization in Java-like Languages DSC-006 Abstract: Language-based information-flow security is concerned with specifying and enforcing security policies for information flow via language constructs. Although much progress has been made on understanding information flow in object-oriented programs, little attention has been given to the impact of class initialization on information flow. This paper turns the spotlight on security implications of class initialization. We reveal the subtleties of information propagation when classes are initialized, and demonstrate how these flows can be exploited to leak information through error recovery. Our main contribution is a type-and-effect system which tracks these information flows. The type system is

parameterized by an arbitrary lattice of security levels. Flows through the class hierarchy and dependencies in field initializers are tracked by typing class initializers wherever they could be executed. The contexts in which each class can be initialized are tracked to prevent insecure flows of out-of-scope contextual information through class initialization statuses and error recovery. We show that the type system enforces termination-insensitive noninterference. ETPL The Foundational Work of Harrison-Ruzzo-Ullman Revisited DSC-007 Abstract: The work by Harrison, Ruzzo, and Ullman (the HRU paper) on safety in the context of the access matrix model is widely considered to be foundational work in access control. In this paper, we address two errors we have discovered in the HRU paper. To our knowledge, these errors have not been previously reported in the literature. The first error regards a proof that shows that safety analysis for mono-operational HRU systems is in NP. The error stems from a faulty assumption that such systems are monotonic for the purpose of safety analysis. We present a corrected proof in this paper. The second error regards a mapping from one version of the safety problem to another that is presented in the HRU paper. We demonstrate that the mapping is not a reduction, and present a reduction that enables us to infer that the second version of safety introduced in the HRU paper is also undecidable for the HRU scheme. These errors lead us to ask whether the notion of safety as defined in the HRU paper is meaningful. We introduce other notions of safety that we argue have more intuitive appeal, and present the corresponding safety analysis results for the HRU scheme. ETPL Unprivileged Black-Box Detection of User-Space Keyloggers DSC-008 Abstract: Software keyloggers are a fast growing class of invasive software often used to harvest confidential information. One of the main reasons for this rapid growth is the possibility for unprivileged programs running in user space to eavesdrop and record all the keystrokes typed by the users of a system. The ability to run in unprivileged mode facilitates their implementation and distribution, but, at the same time, allows one to understand and model their behavior in detail. Leveraging this characteristic, we propose a new detection technique that simulates carefully crafted keystroke sequences in input and observes the behavior of the keylogger in output to unambiguously identify it among all the running processes. We have prototyped our technique as an unprivileged application, hence matching the same ease of deployment of a keylogger executing in unprivileged mode. We have successfully evaluated the underlying technique against the most common free keyloggers. This confirms the viability of our approach in practical scenarios. We have also devised potential evasion techniques that may be adopted to circumvent our approach and proposed a heuristic to strengthen the effectiveness of our solution against more elaborated attacks. Extensive experimental results confirm that our technique is robust to both false positives and false negatives in realistic settings. ETPL Non-Cooperative Location Privacy DSC-009 Abstract: In mobile networks, authentication is a required primitive for most security protocols. Unfortunately, an adversary can monitor pseudonyms used for authentication to track the location of mobile nodes. A frequently proposed solution to protect location privacy suggests that mobile nodes collectively change their pseudonyms in regions called mix zones. This approach is costly. Self-interested mobile nodes might, thus, decide not to cooperate and jeopardize the achievable location privacy. In this paper, we analyze non-cooperative behavior of mobile nodes by using a game-theoretic model, where each player aims at maximizing its location privacy at a minimum cost. We obtain Nash equilibria in static n-player complete information games. As in practice mobile nodes do not know their opponents' payoffs, we then consider static incomplete information games. We establish that symmetric Bayesian-

Nash equilibria exist with simple threshold strategies. By means of numerical results, we predict behavior of selfish mobile nodes. We then investigate dynamic games where players decide to change their pseudonym one after the other and show how this affects strategies at equilibrium. Finally, we design protocols-PseudoGame protocols-based on the results of our analysis and simulate their performance in vehicular network scenarios. ETPL On Inference-Proof View Processing of XML Documents DSC-010 Abstract: This work aims at treating the inference problem in XML documents that are assumed to represent potentially incomplete information. The inference problem consists in providing a control mechanism for enforcing inference-usability confinement of XML documents. More formally, an inference-proof view of an XML document is required to be both indistinguishable from the actual XML document to the clients under their inference capabilities, and to neither contain nor imply any confidential information. We present an algorithm for generating an inference-proof view by weakening the actual XML document, i.e., eliminating confidential information and other information that could be used to infer confidential information. In order to avoid inferences based on the schema of the XML documents, the DTD of the actual XML document is modified according to the weakening operations as well, such that the modified DTD conforms with the generated inference-proof view. ETPL Predicting Architectural Vulnerability on Multithreaded Processors under Resource DSC-011 Contention and Sharing Abstract: Architectural vulnerability factor (AVF) characterizes a processor's vulnerability to soft errors. Interthread resource contention and sharing on a multithreaded processor (e.g., SMT, CMP) shows nonuniform impact on a program's AVF when it is co-scheduled with different programs. However, measuring the AVF is extremely expensive in terms of hardware and computation. This paper proposes a scalable two-level predictive mechanism capable of predicting a program's AVF on a SMT/CMP architecture from easily measured metrics. Essentially, the first-level model correlates the AVF in a contention-free environment with important performance metrics and the processor configuration, while the second-level model captures the interthread resource contention and sharing via processor structures' occupancies. By utilizing the proposed scheme, we can accurately estimate any unseen program's soft error vulnerability under resource contention and sharing with any other program(s), on an arbitrarily configured multithreaded processor. In practice, the proposed model can be used to find soft error resilient thread-to-core scheduling for multithreaded processors. ETPL A System for Timely and Controlled Information Sharing in Emergency Situations, DSC-012 Abstract: During natural disasters or emergency situations, an essential requirement for an effective emergency management is the information sharing. In this paper, we present an access control model to enforce controlled information sharing in emergency situations. An in-depth analysis of the model is discussed throughout the paper, and administration policies are introduced to enhance the model flexibility during emergencies. Moreover, a prototype implementation and experiments results are provided showing the efficiency and scalability of the system. ETPL DNS for Massive-Scale Command and Control DSC-013 Abstract: Attackers, in particular botnet controllers, use stealthy messaging systems to set up large-scale command and control. To systematically understand the potential capability of attackers, we investigate the feasibility of using domain name service (DNS) as a stealthy botnet command-and-control channel. We describe and quantitatively analyze several techniques that can be used to effectively hide malicious DNS activities at the network level. Our experimental evaluation makes use of a two-month-long 4.6-GB

campus network data set and 1 million domain names obtained from alexa.com. We conclude that the DNS-based stealthy command-and-control channel (in particular, the codeword mode) can be very powerful for attackers, showing the need for further research by defenders in this direction. The statistical analysis of DNS payload as a countermeasure has practical limitations inhibiting its large-scale deployment. ETPL On the Privacy Risks of Virtual Keyboards: Automatic Reconstruction of Typed Input DSC-014 from Compromising Reflections, Abstract: We investigate the implications of the ubiquity of personal mobile devices and reveal new techniques for compromising the privacy of users typing on virtual keyboards. Specifically, we show that so-called compromising reflections (in, for example, a victim's sunglasses) of a device's screen are sufficient to enable automated reconstruction, from video, of text typed on a virtual keyboard. Through the use of advanced computer vision and machine learning techniques, we are able to operate under extremely realistic threat models, in real-world operating conditions, which are far beyond the range of more traditional OCR-based attacks. In particular, our system does not require expensive and bulky telescopic lenses: rather, we make use of off-the-shelf, handheld video cameras. In addition, we make no limiting assumptions about the motion of the phone or of the camera, nor the typing style of the user, and are able to reconstruct accurate transcripts of recorded input, even when using footage captured in challenging environments (e.g., on a moving bus). To further underscore the extent of this threat, our system is able to achieve accurate results even at very large distances-up to 61 m for direct surveillance, and 12 m for sunglass reflections. We believe these results highlight the importance of adjusting privacy expectations in response to emerging technologies. ETPL WarningBird: A Near Real-Time Detection System for Suspicious URLs in Twitter DSC-015 Stream Abstract: Twitter is prone to malicious tweets containing URLs for spar, phishing, and malware distribution. Conventional Twitter spar detection schemes utilize account features such as the ratio of tweets containing URLs and the account creation date, or relation features in the Twitter graph. These detection schemes are ineffective against feature fabrications or consume much time and resources. Conventional suspicious URL detection schemes utilize several features including lexical features of URLs, URL redirection, HTIUIL content, and dynamic behavior. However, evading techniques such as time-based evasion and crawler evasion exist. in this paper, we propose WARNINGBIRD, a suspicious URL detection system for Twitter. Our system investigates correlations of URL redirect chains extracted from several tweets. Because attackers have limited resources and usually reuse them, their URL redirect chains frequently share the same URLs. We develop methods to discover correlated URL redirect chains using the frequently shared URLs and to determine their suspiciousness. We collect numerous tweets from the Twitter public timeline and build a statistical classifier using them. Evaluation results show that our classifier accurately and efficiently detects suspicious URLs. We also present WARNINGBIRD as a near real-time system for classifying suspicious URLs in the Twitter stream. ETPL NICE: Network Intrusion Detection and Countermeasure Selection in Virtual Network DSC-016 Systems Abstract: Cloud security is one of most important issues that has attracted a lot of research and development effort in past few years. Particularly, attackers can explore vulnerabilities of a cloud system and compromise virtual machines to deploy further large-scale Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS). DDoS attacks usually involve early stage actions such as multistep exploitation, low-frequency vulnerability scanning, and compromising identified vulnerable virtual machines as zombies, and finally DDoS attacks through the compromised zombies. Within the cloud system, especially the Infrastructureas-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, the detection of zombie exploration attacks is extremely difficult. This is

because cloud users may install vulnerable applications on their virtual machines. To prevent vulnerable virtual machines from being compromised in the cloud, we propose a multiphase distributed vulnerability detection, measurement, and countermeasure selection mechanism called NICE, which is built on attack graph-based analytical models and reconfigurable virtual network-based countermeasures. The proposed framework leverages OpenFlow network programming APIs to build a monitor and control plane over distributed programmable virtual switches to significantly improve attack detection and mitigate attack consequences. The system and security evaluations demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed solution. ETPL Security and Privacy-Enhancing Multicloud Architectures DSC-017 Abstract: Security challenges are still among the biggest obstacles when considering the adoption of cloud services. This triggered a lot of research activities, resulting in a quantity of proposals targeting the various cloud security threats. Alongside with these security issues, the cloud paradigm comes with a new set of unique features, which open the path toward novel security approaches, techniques, and architectures. This paper provides a survey on the achievable security merits by making use of multiple distinct clouds simultaneously. Various distinct architectures are introduced and discussed according to their security and privacy capabilities and prospects. ETPL Entrusting Private Computation and Data to Untrusted Networks DSC-018 Abstract: We present sTile, a technique for distributing trust-needing computation onto insecure networks, while providing probabilistic guarantees that malicious agents that compromise parts of the network cannot learn private data. With sTile, we explore the fundamental cost of achieving privacy through data distribution and bound how much less efficient a privacy-preserving system is than a nonprivate one. This paper focuses specifically on NP-complete problems and demonstrates how sTilebased systems can solve important real-world problems, such as protein folding, image recognition, and resource allocation. We present the algorithms involved in sTile and formally prove that sTile-based systems preserve privacy. We develop a reference sTile-based implementation and empirically evaluate it on several physical networks of varying sizes, including the globally distributed PlanetLab testbed. Our analysis demonstrates sTile's scalability and ability to handle varying network delay, as well as verifies that problems requiring privacy-preservation can be solved using sTile orders of magnitude faster than using today's state-of-the-art alternatives. ETPL Toward Secure Multikeyword Top-k Retrieval over Encrypted Cloud Data DSC-019 Abstract: Cloud computing has emerging as a promising pattern for data outsourcing and high-quality data services. However, concerns of sensitive information on cloud potentially causes privacy problems. Data encryption protects data security to some extent, but at the cost of compromised efficiency. Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) allows retrieval of encrypted data over cloud. In this paper, we focus on addressing data privacy issues using SSE. For the first time, we formulate the privacy issue from the aspect of similarity relevance and scheme robustness. We observe that server-side ranking based on order-preserving encryption (OPE) inevitably leaks data privacy. To eliminate the leakage, we propose a two-round searchable encryption (TRSE) scheme that supports top-$(k)$ multikeyword retrieval. In TRSE, we employ a vector space model and homomorphic encryption. The vector space model helps to provide sufficient search accuracy, and the homomorphic encryption enables users to involve in the ranking while the majority of computing work is done on the server side by operations only on ciphertext. As a result, information leakage can be eliminated and data security is ensured. Thorough security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme guarantees high security and practical efficiency.

ETPL Formal Analysis of Secure Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Networks DSC-020 Abstract: We develop a formal framework for the analysis of security protocols in wireless networks. The framework captures characteristics necessary to reason about neighbor discovery protocols, such as the neighbor relation, device location, and message propagation time. We use this framework to establish general results about the possibility of neighbor discovery. In particular, we show that time-based protocols cannot in general provide secure neighbor discovery. Given this insight, we also use the framework to prove the security of four concrete neighbor discovery protocols, including two novel timeand-location based protocols. We mechanize the model and some proofs in the theorem prover Isabelle. ETPL Authorization Control for a Semantic Data Repository Through an Inference Policy DSC-021 Engine Abstract: Semantic models help in achieving semantic interoperability among sources of data and applications. The necessity to efficiently manage these types of objects has increased the number of specialized repositories, usually referred to as semantic databases. Due to the various sensitivities of data, suitable access control mechanisms pertaining to the semantic repository should be put in place in order to ensure that only authorized users can obtain access to the information in its entirety. In fact, deciding what can be made available to the user without revealing confidential information is made even more difficult because the user may be able to apply logic and reasoning to infer confidential information from the knowledge being provided. In this paper, we design an authorization security model enforced on a semantic model's entities and also propagate on their individuals in the OWL database through an inference policy engine. We provide TBox access control for the construction of a TBox family and propagate this based on the construction of concept taxonomies. We also provide ABox Label-Based Access Control for facts in the domain knowledge and report experiments in order to evaluate the effects of access control on reasoning and modularization. ETPL A Cloud-Oriented Content Delivery Network Paradigm: Modeling and Assessment DSC-022 Abstract: Cloud-oriented Content Delivery Networks (CCDNs) constitute a promising alternative to traditional CDNs. Exploiting the advantages and principles of the cloud, such as the pay as you go business model and geographical dispersion of resources, CCDN can provide a viable and cost effective solution for realizing content delivery networks and services. In this paper a hierarchical framework is proposed and evaluated towards an efficient and scalable solution of content distribution over a multiprovider networked cloud environment, where inter and intra cloud communication resources are simultaneously considered along with traditional cloud computing resources. To efficiently deal with the CCDN deployment problem in this emerging and challenging computing paradigm, the problem is decomposed to graph partitioning and replica placement problems while appropriate cost models are introduced/adapted. Novel approaches on the replica placement problem within the cloud are proposed while the limitations of the physical substrate are taken into consideration. The performance of the proposed hierarchical CCDN framework is assessed via modeling and simulation, while appropriate metrics are defined/adopted associated with and reflecting the interests of the different identified involved key players. ETPL On the Performance of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant MapReduce DSC-023 Abstract: MapReduce is often used for critical data processing, e.g., in the context of scientific or financial simulation. However, there is evidence in the literature that there are arbitrary (or Byzantine) faults that may corrupt the results of MapReduce without being detected. We present a Byzantine faulttolerant MapReduce framework that can run in two modes: non-speculative and speculative. We

thoroughly evaluate experimentally the performance of these two versions of the framework, showing that they use around twice more resources than Hadoop MapReduce, instead of the three times more of alternative solutions. We believe this cost is acceptable for many critical applications. ETPL SafeStack: Automatically Patching Stack-based Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities DSC-024 Abstract: Buffer overflow attacks still pose a significant threat to the security and availability of today's computer systems. Although there are a number of solutions proposed to provide adequate protection against buffer overflow attacks, most of existing solutions terminate the vulnerable program when the buffer overflow occurs, effectively rendering the program unavailable. The impact on availability is a serious problem on service-oriented platforms. This paper presents SafeStack, a system that can automatically diagnose and patch stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities. The key technique of our solution is to virtualize memory accesses and move the vulnerable buffer into protected memory regions, which provides a fundamental and effective protection against recurrence of the same attack without stopping normal system execution. We developed a prototype on a Linux system, and conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the system using a range of applications. Our experimental results showed that SafeStack can quickly generate runtime patches to successfully handle the attack's recurrence. Furthermore, SafeStack only incurs acceptable overhead for the patched applications. ETPL Secure Two-Party Differentially Private Data Release for Vertically-Partitioned Data DSC-025 Abstract: Privacy-preserving data publishing addresses the problem of disclosing sensitive data when mining for useful information. Among the existing privacy models, ε-differential privacy provides one of the strongest privacy guarantees. In this paper, we address the problem of private data publishing, where different attributes for the same set of individuals are held by two parties. In particular, we present an algorithm for differentially private data release for vertically-partitioned data between two parties in the semi-honest adversary model. To achieve this, we first present a two-party protocol for the exponential mechanism. This protocol can be used as a subprotocol by any other algorithm that requires the exponential mechanism in a distributed setting. Furthermore, we propose a two-party algorithm that releases differentially-private data in a secure way according to the definition of secure multiparty computation. Experimental results on real-life data suggest that the proposed algorithm can effectively preserve information for a data mining task. ETPL Comment on "Remote Physical Device Fingerprinting DSC-026 Abstract: In this paper we revisited a method to identify computers by their clocks skew computed from TCP timestamps. We introduced our own tool to compute clock skew of computers in a network. We validated that the original method is suitable for the computer identification but we also discovered that Linux hosts running NTP had became immune to the identification. ETPL CipherXRay: Exposing Cryptographic Operations and Transient Secrets from DSC-027 Monitored Binary Execution Abstract: To enable more effective malware analysis, forensics and reverse engineering, we have developed CipherXRay - a novel binary analysis framework that can automatically identify and recover the cryptographic operations and transient secrets from the execution of potentially obfuscated binary executables. Based on the avalanche effect of cryptographic functions, CipherXRay is able to accurately pinpoint the boundary of cryptographic operation and recover truly transient cryptographic secrets that only exist in memory for one instant in between multiple nested cryptographic operations. CipherXRay can further identify certain operation modes (e.g., ECB, CBC, CFB) of the identified block cipher and tell

whether the identified block cipher operation is encryption or decryption in certain cases. We have empirically validated CipherXRay with OpenSSL, popular password safe KeePassX, the ciphers used by malware Stuxnet, Kraken and Agobot, and a number of third party softwares with built-in compression and checksum. CipherXRay is able to identify various cryptographic operations and recover cryptographic secrets that exist in memory for only a few microseconds. Our results demonstrate that current software implementations of cryptographic algorithms hardly achieve any secrecy if their execution can be monitored. ETPL Secure Encounter-Based Mobile Social Networks: Requirements, Designs, and DSC-028 Tradeoffs Abstract: Encounter-based social networks link users who share a location at the same time, as opposed to traditional social network paradigms of linking users who have an offline friendship. This approach presents fundamentally different challenges from those tackled by previous designs. In this paper, we explore functional and security requirements for these new systems, such as availability, security, and privacy, and present several design options for building secure encounter-based social networks. We examine one recently proposed encounter-based social network design and compare it to a set of idealized security and functionality requirements. We show that it is vulnerable to several attacks, including impersonation, collusion, and privacy breaching, even though it was designed specifically for security. Mindful of the possible pitfalls, we construct a flexible framework for secure encounter-based social networks, which can be used to construct networks that offer different security, privacy, and availability guarantees. We describe two example constructions derived from this framework, and consider each in terms of the ideal requirements. Some of our new designs fulfill more requirements in terms of system security, reliability, and privacy than previous work. We also evaluate real-world performance of one of our designs by implementing a proof-of-concept iPhone application called MeetUp. Experiments highlight the potential of our system. ETPL Orchestrating an Ensemble of MapReduce Jobs for Minimizing Their Makespan DSC-029 Abstract: A key challenge in MapReduce environments is to increase the utilization of MapReduce clusters to minimize their cost. For a set of production jobs that are executed periodically on new data, we can perform an off-line analysis for evaluating performance benefits of different optimization techniques. In this work, we consider a subset of production workloads that consists of MapReduce jobs with no dependencies. We observe that the order in which these jobs are executed can have a significant impact on their overall completion time and the cluster resource utilization. We evaluate the performance benefits of the constructed schedule through an extensive set of simulations over a variety of realistic workloads. The results are workload and cluster-size dependent, but it is typical to achieve up to 10%25% of makespan improvements by simply processing the jobs in the right order. However, in some cases, the simplified abstraction assumed by Johnson's algorithm may lead to a suboptimal job schedule. We design a novel heuristic, called BalancedPools, that significantly improves Johnson's schedule results (up to 15%-38%), exactly in the situations when it produces suboptimal makespan. Overall, we observe up to 50% in the makespan improvements with the new BalancedPools algorithm. ETPL BtrPlace: A Flexible Consolidation Manager for Highly Available Applications DSC-030 Abstract: The massive amount of resources found in datacenters makes it possible to provide high availability to multi-tier applications. Virtualizing these applications makes it possible to consolidate them on servers, reducing runtime costs. Nevertheless, replicated VMs have to be carefully placed within the datacenter to provide high availability and good performance. This requires resolving potentially conflicting application and datacenter requirements, while scaling up to the size of modern datacenters.

We present Btrplace, a flexible consolidation manager that is customized through configuration scripts written by the application and datacenter administrators. BtrPlace relies on constraint programming and an extensible library of placement constraints. The present library of 14 constraints subsumes and extends the capabilities of existing commercial consolidation managers. Scalability is achieved by splitting the datacenter into partitions and computing placements in parallel. Overall, Btrplace repairs a non-viable placement after a major load increase or a maintenance operation for a 5,000 server datacenter hosting 30,000 VMs and involving thousands of constraints in 3 minutes. Using partitions of 2,500 servers, placement computing is reduced to under 30 seconds. ETPL A Hierarchical Approach for the Resource Management of Very Large Cloud DSC-031 Platforms Abstract: Worldwide interest in the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service continues to grow at a rapid pace. The complexities of such cloud computing centers require advanced resource management solutions that are capable of dynamically adapting the cloud platform while providing continuous service and performance guarantees. The goal of this paper is to devise resource allocation policies for virtualized cloud environments that satisfy performance and availability guarantees and minimize energy costs in very large cloud service centers. We present a scalable distributed hierarchical framework based on a mixed-integer non-linear optimization for resource management acting at multiple time-scales. Extensive experiments across a wide variety of configurations demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. ETPL Robustness Analysis of Embedded Control Systems with respect to Signal DSC-032 Perturbations: Finding Minimal Counterexamples using Fault Injection Abstract: Fault-Tolerance of embedded control systems is of great importance, given their wide usage in various domains such as aeronautics, automotive, medical, etc. Signal perturbations such as small amounts of noise, shift, and spikes, can sometimes severely hamper the performance of the system, apart from complete failure of components and links. Finding minimal counterexamples (perturbations on the system leading to violation of fault-tolerance requirements) can be of great assistance to control system designers in understanding and adjusting the fault-tolerance behaviour of the system. Fault injection is an effective method for dependability analysis of such systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of dominating sets of perturbations, and define a minimal set of counterexamples called the basis. We propose effective methods using a simulation-based fault injection technique on Simulink models for finding the basis set at an early stage of design, given the fault specification and fault-tolerance requirements. Experimental results on two different control system examples from the Simulink automotive library demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework. ETPL k-Zero Day Safety: A Network Security Metric for Measuring the Risk of Unknown DSC-033 Vulnerabilities Abstract: By enabling a direct comparison of different security solutions with respect to their relative effectiveness, a network security metric may provide quantifiable evidences to assist security practitioners in securing computer networks. However, research on security metrics has been hindered by difficulties in handling zero day attacks exploiting unknown vulnerabilities. In fact, the security risk of unknown vulnerabilities has been considered as something unmeasurable due to the less predictable nature of software flaws. This causes a major difficulty to security metrics, because a more secure configuration would be of little value if it were equally susceptible to zero day attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel security metric, emph{$k$-zero day safety}, to address this issue. Instead of attempting to rank unknown vulnerabilities, our metric counts how many such vulnerabilities would be required for compromising network assets; a larger count implies more security since the likelihood of having more unknown

vulnerabilities available, applicable, and exploitable all at the same time will be significantly lower. We formally define the metric, analyze the complexity of computing the metric, devise heuristic algorithms for intractable cases, and finally demonstrate through case studies that applying the metric to existing network security practices may generate actionable knowledge. ETPL Discovery and Resolution of Anomalies in Web Access Control Policies DSC-034 Abstract: Emerging computing technologies such as Web services, service-oriented architecture, and cloud computing has enabled us to perform business services more efficiently and effectively. However, we still suffer from unintended security leakages by unauthorized actions in business services while providing more convenient services to Internet users through such a cutting-edge technological growth. Furthermore, designing and managing Web access control policies are often error-prone due to the lack of effective analysis mechanisms and tools. In this paper, we represent an innovative policy anomaly analysis approach for Web access control policies, focusing on XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) policy. We introduce a policy-based segmentation technique to accurately identify policy anomalies and derive effective anomaly resolutions, along with an intuitive visualization representation of analysis results. We also discuss a proof-of-concept implementation of our method called XAnalyzer and demonstrate how our approach can efficiently discover and resolve policy anomalies. ETPL A Large-Scale Study of the Time Required to Compromise a Computer System DSC-035 Abstract: A frequent assumption in the domain of cyber security is that cyber intrusions follow the properties of a Poisson process, i.e., that the number of intrusions are well modeled by a Poisson distribution and that the time between intrusions is exponentially distributed. This paper studies this property by analyzing all cyber intrusions that have been detected across more than 260,000 computer systems over a period of almost three years. The results show that the assumption of a Poisson process model might be unoptimal -- the log-normal distribution is a significantly better fit in terms of modeling both the number of detected intrusions and the time between intrusions, and the Pareto distribution is a significantly better fit in terms of modeling the time to first intrusion. The paper also analyzes whether time to compromise increase for each successful intrusion of a computer system. The results regarding this property suggest that time to compromise decrease along the number of intrusions of a system.

Final Year IEEE Project 2013-2014 - Dependable and Secure Computing Project Title and Abstract

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Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

Elysium Technologies Private Limited

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