This paper analyzes cybersecurity awareness efforts for SMEs in Switzerland. We highlight some weaknesses in these efforts and propose avenues for improvement. Compared to existing work, e.g., (Alahmari and Duncan, 2020), we focus on attitudes and experience of experts trying to bring security to organizations rather than the organizations themselves.

Provides notice of upcoming conference events of interest to practitioners and researchers.

The Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™), is established as the standard platform for hosting enterprise applications written in the Java programming language. Similar to an operating system, a J2EE server can host multiple applications, but this is problematic due to limitations on scalability, weak inter-application isolation and inadequate resource management facilities in the underlying Java platform. These limitations lead to a proliferation of server instances with a consequent dramatic increase in the total memory footprint and more complex system administration. The Multi-tasking Virtual Machine (MVM) solves this problem by providing an efficient and scalable implementation of the isolate API for multiple, isolated tasks, enabling the co-location of multiple server instances in a single MVM process. Isolates also enable the restructuring of a J2EE server implementation as a collection of isolated components, offering increased flexibility and reliability. The resulting system is a step towards a complete and scalable operating environment for enterprise applications. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Enterprise applications are increasingly being built using type-safe programming platforms and deployed over horizontally scalable systems. Horizontal scalability depends crucially on the ability to monitor resource usage and to define and enforce resource management policies capable of guaranteeing a desired service level. However, current safe language platforms have very limited support for resource management, and their cluster-enabled versions reflect this deficiency. We describe an architecture of federated Java/spl trade/ virtual machines. Its distinguishing feature is an integrated resource management interface that addresses the above issues. It offers programmatic control over monitoring and controlling the allocation of resources to applications and their components. The scope of each policy can span multiple nodes, realizing finegrained control. New resource types can be defined and integrated into the framework. Remote management of local resources and the notion of cluster-global resources form a powerful combination capable of expressing policies that achieve effective performance isolation for cluster applications.

Software systems in many circumstances need awareness of their resource usage. Meeting performance requirements often requires the ability to manage consumption of resources provided by the environment. Resource management is traditionally handled by operating systems, but the growing need to use safe languages in the systems programming domain adds increased pressure to equip them with resource management capabilities at a level of abstraction that fits gracefully with the language. This paper proposes an extensible, flexible, and widely applicable resource management interface for the Java platform. The interface is small, but capable of modeling a variety of resources and resource management policies. In particular, application-specific resources can be defined, as well as more traditional computational resources such as heap memory and processor time. The interface is presented here in detail, along with a series of examples and a description of a prototype implementation. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The goal of the Lana project is to develop system support for short-distance wireless applications. We chose a language-based approach: mechanisms like scoping and typing are used to enforce system properties. The Lana language is strongly influenced by Java-it contains interfaces, packages, single inheritance etc.-though is designed with support for disconnected operation, coordination and security. Lana supports concurrent programs. The language semantics states that all memory locations transitively reachable from a program object must be moved along with the program. Further, the set of programs is organized into a hierarchy. When a program moves between nodes then all of its sibling programs are moved along with it. This feature is used by applications to specify hoarding policies: all related programs and objects are grouped under a common umbrella program which is moved. Method calls between programs are asynchronous; thus, a caller is never blocked awaiting a reply that might never come. Each method call generates a unique key object that is used by a program to locate the reply message or exception if ever the program momentarily leaves the network. Return messages-or security or mobility exceptions provoked by the call-have this key value bound to them. Any program that is delegated the key by the caller may therefore service the reply message. Thus a node may leave a network yet safely delegate its pending jobs to other nodes.

It is essential for security to be able to isolate mistrusting programs from one another, and to protect the host platform from programs. Isolation is difficult in object-oriented systems because objects can easily become aliased. Aliases that cross program boundaries can allow programs to exchange information without using a system provided interface that could control information exchange. In Java, mistrusting programs are placed in distinct loader spaces but uncontrolled sharing of system classes can still lead to aliases between programs. This paper presents the object spaces protection model for an object-oriented system. The model decomposes an application into a set of spaces, and each object is assigned to one space. All method calls between objects in different spaces are mediated by a security policy. An implementation of the model in Java is presented.

Describes an algebraic approach to the security engineering of lattice policies. The approach has two main goals. First, it seeks to model access control policies with anti-symmetry, reflexivity and transitivity exceptions using a lattice, and to propose an information flow security definition for the resulting set of policies (POL). Second, it supports a constructive approach to policy specification through an algebraic structure (POL, AND, OR, NOT, /spl equiv/, /spl les/). This structure is homomorphic to Boolean algebra. The approach's goals and design decisions are influenced by the context in which it is being used: a library of reusable security components with tools to facilitate their reuse for securing application systems.

This short paper introduces the CWASAR project. The goal of CWASAR is to design implement a low cost European infrastructure for a secure electronic market place. The project was preceded by a market analysis in Germany, Spain and France, of the basi

A discussion is given on a programming language based approach to information flow control in a system of communicating processes. The approach differs from previous work in that the security level approach to controlling flows is replaced by a mechanism where flows are registered in terms of the set of variable signaling information and that the manner of registering the inter-process information flows does not require any extra message exchanges. The language chosen to present these ideas is Hoare's CSP. The authors give the 'security semantics' of CSP and show, with the aid of two examples, how these semantics can be used to conduct security proofs of parallel programs.>