Enhancing security and continuity management at international airports

Operators of busy contemporary airports have to balance tensions between the timely flow of passengers, flight operations, the conduct of commercial business activities and the effective application of security processes. In addition to specific onsite issues airport operators liaise with a range of organisations which set and enforce aviation-related policies and regulations as well as border security agencies responsible for customs, quarantine and immigration, in addition to first response security services. The challenging demands of coordinating and planning in such complex socio-technical contexts place considerable pressure on airport management to facilitate coordination of what are often conflicting goals and expectations among groups that have standing in respect to safe and secure air travel. What are, as yet, significantly unexplored issues in large airports are options for the optimal coordination of efforts from the range of public and private sector participants active in airport security and crisis management. A further aspect of this issue is how airport management systems operate when there is a transition from business-as-usual into an emergency/crisis situation and then, on recovery, back to ‘normal’ functioning. Business Continuity Planning (BCP), incorporating sub-plans for emergency response, continuation of output and recovery of degraded operating capacity, would fit such a context. The implementation of BCP practices in such a significant high security setting offers considerable potential benefit yet entails considerable challenges. This paper presents early results of a 4 year nationally funded industry-based research project examining the merger of Business Continuity Planning and Transport Security Planning as a means of generating capability for improved security and reliability and, ultimately, enhanced resilience in major airports. The project is part of a larger research program on the Design of Secure Airports that includes most of the gazetted ‘first response’ international airports in Australia, key Aviation industry groups and all aviation-related border and security regulators as collaborative partners. The paper examines a number of initial themes in the research, including: ? Approaches to integrating Business Continuity & Aviation Security Planning within airport operations; ? Assessment of gaps in management protocols and operational capacities for identifying and responding to crises within and across critical aviation infrastructure; ? Identification of convergent and divergent approaches to crisis management used across Austral-Asia and their alignment to planned and possible infrastructure evolution.

The democratic deficit and school-based management in Australia

Purpose: The paper seeks to apply the theory of the democratic deficit to school-based management with an emphasis on Australia. This theory was developed to examine managerial restructuring of the Australian Public Service in the 1990s. Given similarities between the use of managerial practices in the public service and government schools, the authors draw on recent literature about school-based management in Australia and apply the democratic deficit theory to it. ----- ----- Design/methodology/approach: This paper is conceptual in focus. The authors analyse literature in terms of the three components of the democratic deficit – i.e. the weakening of accountability, the denial of the roles and values of public employees, and the emergence of a “hollow state” – and in relation to the application of this theory to the Australian Public Service.----- ----- Findings: A trend towards the three components of the democratic deficit is evident in Australia although, to date, its emergence has not been as extensive as in the UK. The authors argue that the democratic principles on which public schooling in Australia was founded are being eroded by managerial and market practices.----- ----- Practical implications: These findings provide policy makers and practitioners with another way of examining managerial and market understandings of school-based management and its impact on teachers and on students. It offers suggestions to reorient practices away from those that are exclusively managerial-based towards those that are public-sector based.----- ----- Originality/value: The value of this paper is that it applies the theory of the democratic deficit to current understandings of school-based management.

Minority activism : trends informing political participation across Australian communities

In the late 1990’s, intense and vigorous debate surrounded the impact of minority communities on Australia’s mainstream society. The rise of far-right populism took the stage with the introduction to the political landscape of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party, whilst John Howard’s Liberal-National Coalition Government took the fore on debate over immigration issues corresponding with an influx of irregular arrivals. In 2001, following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States of America and subsequent attacks on western targets globally, many of these issues continued to be debated through the security posturing that followed. In recent years, much effort has been afforded to countering the threat of terrorism from home grown assailants. The Government has introduced stringent legislative responses whilst researchers have studied social movements and trends within Australian communities, particularly with respect to minorities. In 2008, the Scanlon Foundation, in association with Monash University and various government entities, released its findings into its survey approach to mapping social cohesion in Australia. It identified a number of spheres of exploration which it believed were essential to measuring cohesiveness of Australian communities generally including, economic, political and socio-cultural factors (Markus and Dharmalingam, 2008). This doctoral project report will explore the political sphere as identified in the Mapping Social Cohesion project and apply it to identified minority ethnic communities. The Scanlon Foundation project identified political participation as one of a number of true indicators of social cohesion. This project acknowledges that democracy in Australia is represented predominantly by two political entities representing a vast majority of constituents under a compulsory voting regime. This essay will identify the levels of political activism achieved by minority ethnic communities and access to democratic participation within the Australian political structure. It will define a ten year period from 1999 to 2009, identifying trends and issues within minority communities that have proactively and reactively promoted engagement in achieving a political voice, framed within a mainstream-dominated political system. It will research social movements and other influential factors over that period to enrich existing knowledge in relation to political participation rates across Australian communities.

A hierarchical security assessment model for object-oriented programs

We present a hierarchical model for assessing an object-oriented program's security. Security is quantified using structural properties of the program code to identify the ways in which `classified' data values may be transferred between objects. The model begins with a set of low-level security metrics based on traditional design characteristics of object-oriented classes, such as data encapsulation, cohesion and coupling. These metrics are then used to characterise higher-level properties concerning the overall readability and writability of classified data throughout the program. In turn, these metrics are then mapped to well-known security design principles such as `assigning the least privilege' and `reducing the size of the attack surface'. Finally, the entire program's security is summarised as a single security index value. These metrics allow different versions of the same program, or different programs intended to perform the same task, to be compared for their relative security at a number of different abstraction levels. The model is validated via an experiment involving five open source Java programs, using a static analysis tool we have developed to automatically extract the security metrics from compiled Java bytecode.

Information security management : a case study of an information security culture

This thesis argues that in order to establish a sound information security culture it is necessary to look at organisation's information security systems in a socio- technical context. The motivation for this research stems from the continuing concern of ineffective information security in organisations, leading to potentially significant monetary losses. It is important to address both technical and non- technical aspects when dealing with information security management. Culture has been identified as an underlying determinant of individuals' behaviour and this extends to information security culture, particularly in developing countries. This research investigates information security culture in the Saudi Arabia context. The theoretical foundation for the study is based on organisational and national culture theories. A conceptual framework for this study was constructed based on Peterson and Smith's (1997) model of national culture. This framework guides the study of national, organisational and technological values and their relationships to the development of information security culture. Further, the study seeks to better understand how these values might affect the development and deployment of an organisation's information security culture. Drawing on evidence from three exploratory case studies, an emergent conceptual framework was developed from the traditional human behaviour and the social environment perspectives used in social work, This framework contributes to in- formation security management by identifying behaviours related to four modes of information security practice. These modes provide a sound basis that can be used to evaluate individual organisational members' behaviour and the adequacy of ex- isting security measures. The results confirm the plausibility of the four modes of practice. Furthermore, a final framework was developed by integrating the four modes framework into the research framework. The outcomes of the three case stud- ies demonstrate that some of the national, organisational and technological values have clear impacts on the development and deployment of organisations' informa- tion security culture. This research, by providing an understanding the in uence of national, organi- sational and technological values on individuals' information security behaviour, contributes to building a theory of information security culture development within an organisational context. The research reports on the development of an inte- grated information security culture model that highlights recommendations for developing an information security culture. The research framework, introduced by this research, is put forward as a robust starting point for further related work in this area.

Security analysis and enhancement of one-way hash based low-cost authentication protocol (OHLCAP)

Choi et al. recently proposed an efficient RFID authentication protocol for a ubiquitous computing environment, OHLCAP(One-Way Hash based Low-Cost Authentication Protocol). However, this paper reveals that the protocol has several security weaknesses : 1) traceability based on the leakage of counter information, 2) vulnerability to an impersonation attack by maliciously updating a random number, and 3) traceability based on a physically-attacked tag. Finally, a security enhanced group-based authentication protocol is presented.

A learning-based approach to reactive security

Despite the conventional wisdom that proactive security is superior to reactive security, we show that reactive security can be competitive with proactive security as long as the reactive defender learns from past attacks instead of myopically overreacting to the last attack. Our game-theoretic model follows common practice in the security literature by making worst-case assumptions about the attacker: we grant the attacker complete knowledge of the defender’s strategy and do not require the attacker to act rationally. In this model, we bound the competitive ratio between a reactive defense algorithm (which is inspired by online learning theory) and the best fixed proactive defense. Additionally, we show that, unlike proactive defenses, this reactive strategy is robust to a lack of information about the attacker’s incentives and knowledge.

Open problems in the security of learning

Machine learning has become a valuable tool for detecting and preventing malicious activity. However, as more applications employ machine learning techniques in adversarial decision-making situations, increasingly powerful attacks become possible against machine learning systems. In this paper, we present three broad research directions towards the end of developing truly secure learning. First, we suggest that finding bounds on adversarial influence is important to understand the limits of what an attacker can and cannot do to a learning system. Second, we investigate the value of adversarial capabilities-the success of an attack depends largely on what types of information and influence the attacker has. Finally, we propose directions in technologies for secure learning and suggest lines of investigation into secure techniques for learning in adversarial environments. We intend this paper to foster discussion about the security of machine learning, and we believe that the research directions we propose represent the most important directions to pursue in the quest for secure learning.

Improving information security management in nonprofit organisations

All organisations, irrespective of size and type, need effective information security management (ISM) practices to protect vital organisational in- formation assets. However, little is known about the information security management practices of nonprofit organisations. Australian nonprofit organisations (NPOs) employed 889,900 people, managed 4.6 million volunteers and contributed $40,959 million to the economy during 2006-2007 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009). This thesis describes the perceptions of information security management in two Australian NPOs and examines the appropriateness of the ISO 27002 information security management standard in an NPO context. The overall approach to the research is interpretive. A collective case study has been performed, consisting of two instrumental case studies with the researcher being embedded within two NPOs for extended periods of time. Data gathering and analysis was informed by grounded theory and action research, and the Technology Acceptance Model was utilised as a lens to explore the findings and provide limited generalisability to other contexts. The major findings include a distinct lack of information security management best practice in both organisations. ISM Governance and risk management was lacking and ISM policy was either outdated or non- existent. While some user focused ISM practices were evident, reference to standards, such as ISO 27002, were absent. The main factor that negatively impacted on ISM practices was the lack of resources available for ISM in the NPOs studied. Two novel aspects of information security dis- covered in this research were the importance of accuracy and consistency of information. The contribution of this research is a preliminary understanding of ISM practices and perceptions in NPOs. Recommendations for a new approach to managing information security management in nonprofit organisations have been proposed.

Tool-supported dataflow analysis of a security-critical embedded device

Defence organisations perform information security evaluations to confirm that electronic communications devices are safe to use in security-critical situations. Such evaluations include tracing all possible dataflow paths through the device, but this process is tedious and error-prone, so automated reachability analysis tools are needed to make security evaluations faster and more accurate. Previous research has produced a tool, SIFA, for dataflow analysis of basic digital circuitry, but it cannot analyse dataflow through microprocessors embedded within the circuit since this depends on the software they run. We have developed a static analysis tool that produces SIFA compatible dataflow graphs from embedded microcontroller programs written in C. In this paper we present a case study which shows how this new capability supports combined hardware and software dataflow analyses of a security critical communications device.