SAFE: A Declarative Trust-Agile System with Linked Credentials

Secure Access For Everyone (SAFE), is an integrated system for managing trust

using a logic-based declarative language. Logical trust systems authorize each

request by constructing a proof from a context---a set of authenticated logic

statements representing credentials and policies issued by various principals

in a networked system. A key barrier to practical use of logical trust systems

is the problem of managing proof contexts: identifying, validating, and

assembling the credentials and policies that are relevant to each trust

decision.

SAFE addresses this challenge by (i) proposing a distributed authenticated data

repository for storing the credentials and policies; (ii) introducing a

programmable credential discovery and assembly layer that generates the

appropriate tailored context for a given request. The authenticated data

repository is built upon a scalable key-value store with its contents named by

secure identifiers and certified by the issuing principal. The SAFE language

provides scripting primitives to generate and organize logic sets representing

credentials and policies, materialize the logic sets as certificates, and link

them to reflect delegation patterns in the application. The authorizer fetches

the logic sets on demand, then validates and caches them locally for further

use. Upon each request, the authorizer constructs the tailored proof context

and provides it to the SAFE inference for certified validation.

Delegation-driven credential linking with certified data distribution provides

flexible and dynamic policy control enabling security and trust infrastructure

to be agile, while addressing the perennial problems related to today's

certificate infrastructure: automated credential discovery, scalable

revocation, and issuing credentials without relying on centralized authority.

We envision SAFE as a new foundation for building secure network systems. We

used SAFE to build secure services based on case studies drawn from practice:

(i) a secure name service resolver similar to DNS that resolves a name across

multi-domain federated systems; (ii) a secure proxy shim to delegate access

control decisions in a key-value store; (iii) an authorization module for a

networked infrastructure-as-a-service system with a federated trust structure

(NSF GENI initiative); and (iv) a secure cooperative data analytics service

that adheres to individual secrecy constraints while disclosing the data. We

present empirical evaluation based on these case studies and demonstrate that

SAFE supports a wide range of applications with low overhead.

Progress and Research in Cybersecurity - Supporting a resilient and trustworthy system for the UK

Executive summary
Digital systems have transformed, and will continue to transform, our world. Supportive government policy, a strong research base and a history of industrial success make the UK particularly well-placed to realise the benefits of the emerging digital society. These benefits have already been substantial, but they remain at risk. Protecting the benefits and minimising the risks requires reliable and robust cybersecurity, underpinned by a strong research and translation system.
Trust is essential for growing and maintaining participation in the digital society. Organisations earn trust by acting in a trustworthy manner: building systems that are reliable and secure, treating people, their privacy and their data with respect, and providing credible and comprehensible information to help people understand how secure they are.
Resilience, the ability to function, adapt, grow, learn and transform under stress or in the face of shocks, will help organisations deliver systems that are reliable and secure. Resilient organisations can better protect their customers, provide more useful products and services, and earn people’s trust.
Research and innovation in industry and academia will continue to make important contributions to creating this resilient and trusted digital environment. Research can illuminate how best to build, assess and improve digital systems, integrating insights from different disciplines, sectors and around the globe. It can also generate advances to help cybersecurity keep up with the continued evolution of cyber risks.
Translation of innovative ideas and approaches from research will create a strong supply of reliable, proven solutions to difficult to predict cybersecurity risks. This is best achieved by maximising the diversity and number of innovations that see the light of day as products.
Policy, practice and research will all need to adapt. The recommendations made in this report seek to set up a trustworthy, self-improving and resilient digital environment that can thrive in the face of unanticipated threats, and earn the trust people place in it.
Innovation and research will be particularly important to the UK’s economy as it establishes a new relationship with the EU. Cybersecurity delivers important economic benefits, both by underpinning the digital foundations of UK business and trade and also through innovation that feeds directly into growth. The findings of this report will be relevant regardless of how the UK’s relationship to the EU changes.
Headline recommendations
● Trust: Governments must commit to preserving the robustness of encryption, including end-to-end encryption, and promoting its widespread use. Encryption is a foundational security technology that is needed to build user trust, improve security standards and fully realise the benefits of digital systems.
● Resilience: Government should commission an independent review of the UK’s future cybersecurity needs, focused on the institutional structures needed to support resilient and trustworthy digital systems in the medium and longer term. A self-improving, resilient digital environment will need to be guided and governed by institutions that are transparent, expert and have a clear and widely-understood remit.
● Research: A step change in cybersecurity research and practice should be pursued; it will require a new approach to research, focused on identifying ambitious high-level goals and enabling excellent researchers to pursue those ambitions. This would build on the UK's existing strengths in many aspects of cybersecurity research and ultimately help build a resilient and trusted digital sector based on excellent research and world-class expertise.
● Translation: The UK should promote a free and unencumbered flow of cybersecurity ideas from research to practical use and support approaches that have public benefits beyond their short term financial return. The unanticipated nature of future cyber threats means that a diverse set of cybersecurity ideas and approaches will be needed to build resilience and adaptivity. Many of the most valuable ideas will have broad security benefits for the public, beyond any direct financial returns.

Secure 5G Wireless Communications: A Joint Relay Selection and Wireless Power Transfer Approach

In this paper, we investigate the secrecy performance of an energy harvesting relay system, where a legitimate source communicates with a legitimate destination via the assistance of multiple trusted relays. In the considered system, the source and relays deploy the time-switching-based radio frequency energy harvesting technique to harvest energy from a multi-antenna beacon. Different antenna selection and relay selection schemes are applied to enhance the security of the system. Specifically, two relay selection schemes based on the partial and full knowledge of channel state information, i.e., optimal relay selection and partial relay selection, and two antenna selection schemes for harvesting energy at source and relays, i.e., maximizing energy harvesting channel for the source and maximizing energy harvesting channel for the selected relay, are proposed. The exact and asymptotic expressions of secrecy outage probability in these schemes are derived. We demonstrate that applying relay selection approaches in the considered energy harvesting system can enhance the security performance. In particular, optimal relay selection scheme outperforms partial relay selection scheme and achieves full secrecy diversity order, regardless of energy harvesting scenarios.

Secure Full-Duplex Small-Cell Networks in a Spectrum Sharing Environment

In this paper, we propose three relay selection schemes for full-duplex heterogeneous networks in the presence of multiple cognitive radio eavesdroppers. In this setup, the cognitive small-cell nodes (secondary network) can share the spectrum licensed to the macro-cell system (primary network) on the condition that the quality-of-service of the primary network is always satisfied subjected to its outage probability constraint. The messages are delivered from one small-cell base station to the destination with the help of full-duplex small-cell base stations, which act as relay nodes. Based on the availability of the network’s channel state information at the secondary information source, three different selection criteria for full-duplex relays, namely: 1) partial relay selection; 2) optimal relay selection; and 3) minimal self-interference relay selection, are proposed. We derive the exact closed-form and asymptotic expressions of the secrecy outage probability for the three criteria under the attack of non-colluding/colluding eavesdroppers. We demonstrate that the optimal relay selection scheme outperforms the partial relay selection and minimal self-interference relay selection schemes at the expense of acquiring full channel state information knowledge. In addition, increasing the number of the full-duplex small-cell base stations can improve the security performance. At the illegitimate side, deploying colluding eavesdroppers and increasing the number of eavesdroppers put the confidential information at a greater risk. Besides, the transmit power and the desire outage probability of the primary network have great influences on the secrecy outage probability of the secondary network. 

Secure Wireless Key Establishment Using Retrodirective Array

In this paper a new method of establishing secret keys for wireless communications is proposed. A retrodirective array (RDA) that is configured to receive and re-transmit at different frequencies is utilized as a relay node. Specifically the analogue RDA is able to respond in ‘real-time’, reducing the required number of time slots for key establishment to two, compared with at least three in previous relay key generation schemes. More importantly, in the proposed architecture equivalent reciprocal wireless channels between legitimate keying nodes can be randomly updated within one channel coherence time period, leading to greatly increased key generation rates (KGRs) in slow fading environment. The secrecy performance of this RDA assisted key generation system is evaluated and it is shown that it outperforms previous relay key generation systems.

Retrodirective Assisted Secure Wireless Key Establishment

In this paper a new type of architecture for secure wireless key establishment is proposed. A retrodirective array (RDA) that is configured to receive and re-transmit at different frequencies is utilized as a relay node. The RDA is able to respond in ‘real-time’, reducing the required number of time slots to two. More importantly, in this architecture equivalent reciprocal wireless channels between legitimate keying nodes can be randomly updated within one channel coherence time period, leading to greatly increased key generation rates (KGRs) in slow fading environment. The secrecy performance of this RDA assisted key generation system is evaluated under several eavesdropping strategies and it is shown that it outperforms previous relay key generation systems.

Secure Web Service Clients on Mobile Devices

Enterprise apps on mobile devices typically need to communicate with other system components by consuming web services. Since most of the current mobile device platforms (such as Android) do not provide built-in features for consuming SOAP services, extensions have to be designed. Additionally in order to accommodate the typical enhanced security requirements of enterprise apps, it is important to be able to deal with SOAP web service security extensions on client side. In this article we show that neither the built-in SOAP capabilities for Android web service clients are sufficient for enterprise apps nor are the necessary security features supported by the platform as is. After discussing different existing extensions making Android devices SOAP capable we explain why none of them is really satisfactory in an enterprise context. Then we present our own solution which accommodates not only SOAP but also the WS-Security features on top of SOAP. Our solution heavily relies on code generation in order to keep the flexibility benefits of SOAP on one hand while still keeping the development effort manageable for software development. Our approach provides a good foundation for the implementation of other SOAP extensions apart from security on the Android platform as well. In addition our solution based on the gSOAP framework may be used for other mobile platforms in a similar manner.

The Design and Implementation of a SD Card File System

SD card (Secure Digital Memory Card) is widely used in portable storage medium. Currently, latest researches on SD card, are mainly SD card controller based on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Most of them are relying on API interface (Application Programming Interface), AHB bus (Advanced High performance Bus), etc. They are dedicated to the realization of ultra high speed communication between SD card and upper systems. Studies about SD card controller, really play a vital role in the field of high speed cameras and other sub-areas of expertise. This design of FPGA-based file systems and SD2.0 IP (Intellectual Property core) does not only exhibit a nice transmission rate, but also achieve the systematic management of files, while retaining a strong portability and practicality. The file system design and implementation on a SD card covers the main three IP innovation points. First, the combination and integration of file system and SD card controller, makes the overall system highly integrated and practical. The popular SD2.0 protocol is implemented for communication channels. Pure digital logic design based on VHDL (Very-High-Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language), integrates the SD card controller in hardware layer and the FAT32 file system for the entire system. Secondly, the document management system mechanism makes document processing more convenient and easy. Especially for small files in batch processing, it can ease the pressure of upper system to frequently access and process them, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of systems. Finally, digital design ensures the superior performance. For transmission security, CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) algorithm is for data transmission protection. Design of each module is platform-independent of macro cells, and keeps a better portability. Custom integrated instructions and interfaces may facilitate easily to use. Finally, the actual test went through multi-platform method, Xilinx and Altera FPGA developing platforms. The timing simulation and debugging of each module was covered. Finally, Test results show that the designed FPGA-based file system IP on SD card can support SD card, TF card and Micro SD with 2.0 protocols, and the successful implementation of systematic management for stored files, and supports SD bus mode. Data read and write rates in Kingston class10 card is approximately 24.27MB/s and 16.94MB/s.

Language-based Techniques for Practical and Trustworthy Secure Multi-party Computations

Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) enables a set of parties to collaboratively compute, using cryptographic protocols, a function over their private data in a way that the participants do not see each other's data, they only see the final output. Typical MPC examples include statistical computations over joint private data, private set intersection, and auctions. While these applications are examples of monolithic MPC, richer MPC applications move between "normal" (i.e., per-party local) and "secure" (i.e., joint, multi-party secure) modes repeatedly, resulting overall in mixed-mode computations. For example, we might use MPC to implement the role of the dealer in a game of mental poker -- the game will be divided into rounds of local decision-making (e.g. bidding) and joint interaction (e.g. dealing). Mixed-mode computations are also used to improve performance over monolithic secure computations. Starting with the Fairplay project, several MPC frameworks have been proposed in the last decade to help programmers write MPC applications in a high-level language, while the toolchain manages the low-level details. However, these frameworks are either not expressive enough to allow writing mixed-mode applications or lack formal specification, and reasoning capabilities, thereby diminishing the parties' trust in such tools, and the programs written using them. Furthermore, none of the frameworks provides a verified toolchain to run the MPC programs, leaving the potential of security holes that can compromise the privacy of parties' data. This dissertation presents language-based techniques to make MPC more practical and trustworthy. First, it presents the design and implementation of a new MPC Domain Specific Language, called Wysteria, for writing rich mixed-mode MPC applications. Wysteria provides several benefits over previous languages, including a conceptual single thread of control, generic support for more than two parties, high-level abstractions for secret shares, and a fully formalized type system and operational semantics. Using Wysteria, we have implemented several MPC applications, including, for the first time, a card dealing application. The dissertation next presents Wys*, an embedding of Wysteria in F*, a full-featured verification oriented programming language. Wys* improves on Wysteria along three lines: (a) It enables programmers to formally verify the correctness and security properties of their programs. As far as we know, Wys* is the first language to provide verification capabilities for MPC programs. (b) It provides a partially verified toolchain to run MPC programs, and finally (c) It enables the MPC programs to use, with no extra effort, standard language constructs from the host language F*, thereby making it more usable and scalable. Finally, the dissertation develops static analyses that help optimize monolithic MPC programs into mixed-mode MPC programs, while providing similar privacy guarantees as the monolithic versions.

Modernizing Secure OLAP Applications with a Model-Driven Approach

The majority of the organizations store their historical business information in data warehouses which are queried to make strategic decisions by using online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. This information has to be correctly assured against unauthorized accesses, but nevertheless there are a great amount of legacy OLAP applications that have been developed without considering security aspects or these have been incorporated once the system was implemented. This work defines a reverse engineering process that allows us to obtain the conceptual model corresponding to a legacy OLAP application, and also analyses and represents the security aspects that could have established. This process has been aligned with a model-driven architecture for developing secure OLAP applications by defining the transformations needed to automatically apply it. Once the conceptual model has been extracted, it can be easily modified and improved with security, and automatically transformed to generate the new implementation.

Making Board Meetings More Secure and Efficient: Purging the Paper

The Division of Professional and Occupational Licensing is an administrative unit within the Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation that provides support to 40 professional and occupational regulatory boards. All board members need documents to review during the meeting. Some boards use a fleet of dated laptops during the meetings to give board members the meeting materials in PDF format; however many of boards still print the meeting materials and put them into binders. .In today's age, there has to be a more efficient way to conduct meetings without all of the paper. This paper explores alternatives to paper and laptops for use at these meetings. It was concluded that a tablet with a Windows Operating System would be the best way to go.

Obesity And Inflammation And The Effect On The Hematopoietic System.

Bone marrow is organized in specialized microenvironments known as 'marrow niches'. These are important for the maintenance of stem cells and their hematopoietic progenitors whose homeostasis also depends on other cell types present in the tissue. Extrinsic factors, such as infection and inflammatory states, may affect this system by causing cytokine dysregulation (imbalance in cytokine production) and changes in cell proliferation and self-renewal rates, and may also induce changes in the metabolism and cell cycle. Known to relate to chronic inflammation, obesity is responsible for systemic changes that are best studied in the cardiovascular system. Little is known regarding the changes in the hematopoietic system induced by the inflammatory state carried by obesity or the cell and molecular mechanisms involved. The understanding of the biological behavior of hematopoietic stem cells under obesity-induced chronic inflammation could help elucidate the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in other inflammatory processes, such as neoplastic diseases and bone marrow failure syndromes.

The Value Of The 2005 International Society Of Urological Pathology (isup) Modified Gleason Grading System As A Predictor Of Biochemical Recurrence After Radical Prostatectomy.

To compare time and risk to biochemical recurrence (BR) after radical prostatectomy of two chronologically different groups of patients using the standard and the modified Gleason system (MGS). Cohort 1 comprised biopsies of 197 patients graded according to the standard Gleason system (SGS) in the period 1997/2004, and cohort 2, 176 biopsies graded according to the modified system in the period 2005/2011. Time to BR was analyzed with the Kaplan-Meier product-limit analysis and prediction of shorter time to recurrence using univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazards model. Patients in cohort 2 reflected time-related changes: striking increase in clinical stage T1c, systematic use of extended biopsies, and lower percentage of total length of cancer in millimeter in all cores. The MGS used in cohort 2 showed fewer biopsies with Gleason score ≤ 6 and more biopsies of the intermediate Gleason score 7. Time to BR using the Kaplan-Meier curves showed statistical significance using the MGS in cohort 2, but not the SGS in cohort 1. Only the MGS predicted shorter time to BR on univariate analysis and on multivariate analysis was an independent predictor. The results favor that the 2005 International Society of Urological Pathology modified system is a refinement of the Gleason grading and valuable for contemporary clinical practice.

The Applicability Of Ordered Mesoporous Sba-15 And Its Hydrophobic Glutaraldehyde-bridge Derivative To Improve Ibuprofen-loading In Releasing System.

The mesoporous SBA-15 silica with uniform hexagonal pore, narrow pore size distribution and tuneable pore diameter was organofunctionalized with glutaraldehyde-bridged silylating agent. The precursor and its derivative silicas were ibuprofen-loaded for controlled delivery in simulated biological fluids. The synthesized silicas were characterized by elemental analysis, infrared spectroscopy, (13)C and (29)Si solid state NMR spectroscopy, nitrogen adsorption, X-ray diffractometry, thermogravimetry and scanning electron microscopy. Surface functionalization with amine containing bridged hydrophobic structure resulted in significantly decreased surface area from 802.4 to 63.0 m(2) g(-1) and pore diameter 8.0-6.0 nm, which ultimately increased the drug-loading capacity from 18.0% up to 28.3% and a very slow release rate of ibuprofen over the period of 72.5h. The in vitro drug release demonstrated that SBA-15 presented the fastest release from 25% to 27% and SBA-15GA gave near 10% of drug release in all fluids during 72.5 h. The Korsmeyer-Peppas model better fits the release data with the Fickian diffusion mechanism and zero order kinetics for synthesized mesoporous silicas. Both pore sizes and hydrophobicity influenced the rate of the release process, indicating that the chemically modified silica can be suggested to design formulation of slow and constant release over a defined period, to avoid repeated administration.