This panel will discuss the interplay between key emerging security trends centered around big data analytics and security. With the explosion of big data and advent of cloud computing, data analytics has not only become prevalent but also a critical business need. Internet applications today consume vast amounts of data collected from heterogeneous big data repositories and provide meaningful insights from it. These include applications for business forecasting, investment and finance, healthcare and well-being, science and hi-tech, to name a few. Security and operational intelligence is one of the critical areas where big data analytics is expected to play a crucial role. Security analytics in a big data environment presents a unique set of challenges, not properly addressed by the existing security incident and event monitoring (or SIEM) systems that typically work with a limited set of traditional data sources (firewall, IDS, etc.) in an enterprise network. A big data environment presents both a great opportunity and a challenge due to the explosion and heterogeneity of the potential data sources that extend the boundary of analytics to social networks, real time streams and other forms of highly contextual data that is characterized by high volume and speed. In addition to meeting infrastructure challenges, there remain additional unaddressed issues, including but not limited to development of self-evolving threat ontologies, integrated network and application layer analytics, and detection of "low and slow" attacks. At the same time, security analytics requires a high degree of data assurance, where assurance implies that the data be trustworthy as well as managed in a privacy preserving manner. Our panelists represent individuals from industry, academia, and government who are at the forefront of big data security analytics. They will provide insights into these unique challenges, survey the emerging trends, and lay out a vision for future.

Conformance testing procedures for generating tests from the finite state model representation of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) policies are proposed and evaluated. A test suite generated using one of these procedures has excellent fault detection ability but is astronomically large. Two approaches to reduce the size of the generated test suite were investigated. One is based on a set of six heuristics and the other directly generates a test suite from the finite state model using random selection of paths in the policy model. Empirical studies revealed that the second approach to test suite generation, combined with one or more heuristics, is most effective in the detection of both first-order mutation and malicious faults and generates a significantly smaller test suite than the one generated directly from the finite state models.

Authorization and access control in Web services is complicated by the unique requirements of the dynamic Web services paradigm. Current authentication mechanisms for Web services do not differentiate between users in terms of fine-grained access privileges. This results in an all-or-nothing access which is not flexible enough for modern day business processes using Web services to execute. In this paper, we present a policy-based authorization framework to address this requirement. We have designed a profile of the well-known WS-policy specification tailored to meet the access control requirements in Web services by integrating WS-policy with an access control policy specification language, X-GTRBAC. The design of the profile is aimed at bridging the gap between available policy standards for Web services and existing policy specification languages for access control. The profile supports the WS-policy attachment specification, which allows separate policies to be associated with multiple components of a Web service description, and one of our key contributions is the design of an algorithm to compute the effective policy for the Web service given the multiple policy attachments. To allow Web service applications to use our solution, we have adopted a component-based design approach based on well-known UML notations. We have also prototyped our architecture, and implemented it as a loosely coupled Web service providing healthcare information services to physicians subject to applicable authorization policies.

Policy-based management for federated healthcare systems has recently gained increasing attention due to strict privacy and disclosure rules. Although the work on privacy languages and enforcement mechanisms, such as Hippocratic databases, has advanced our understanding of designing privacy-preserving policies for healthcare databases, the need to integrate these policies in a practical healthcare framework is becoming acute. Additionally, although most work in this area has been organization oriented, dealing with the exchange of information between healthcare organizations (such as referrals), the requirements for the emerging area of personal healthcare information management have so far not been adequately addressed. These shortcomings arise from the lack of a sophisticated policy specification language and enforcement architecture that can capture the requirement for 1) the integration of privacy and disclosure policies with well-known healthcare standards used in the industry in order to specify the precise requirements of a practical healthcare system and 2) the provision of ubiquitous healthcare services to patients using the same infrastructure that enables federated healthcare management for organizations. In this paper, we have designed a policy-based system to mitigate these concerns. First, we have designed our disclosure and privacy policies by using a requirements specification based on a set of use cases for the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard proposed by the community. Second, we present a context-aware policy specification language, which allows encoding of CDA-based requirements use cases into privacy and disclosure policy rules. We have shown that our policy specification language is effective in terms of handling a variety of expressive constraints on CDA-encoded document contents. Our language enables specification of privacy-aware access control for federated healthcare information across organizational boundaries, whereas the use of contextual constraints allows the incorporation of user and environment context in the access control mechanism for personal healthcare information management. Moreover, the declarative syntax of the policy rules makes the policy adaptable to changes in privacy regulations or patient preferences. We also present an enforcement architecture for the federated healthcare framework proposed in this paper.

Policy-based management (PBM) has been considered as a promising approach for design and enforcement of access management policies for distributed systems. The increasing shift toward federated information sharing in the organizational landscape, however, calls for revisiting current PBM approaches to satisfy the unique security requirements of the federated paradigm. This presents a twofold challenge for the design of a PBM approach, where, on the one hand, the policy must incorporate the access management needs of the individual systems, while, on the other hand, the policies across multiple systems must be designed in such a manner that they can be uniformly developed, deployed, and integrated within the federated system. In this paper, we analyze the impact of security management challenges on policy design and formulate a policy engineering methodology based on principles of software engineering to develop a PBM solution for federated systems. We present X-FEDERATE, a policy engineering framework for federated access management using an extension of the well-known role-based access control (RBAC) model. Our framework consists of an XML-based policy specification language, its UML-based meta-model, and an enforcement architecture. We provide a comparison of our framework with related approaches and highlight its significance for federated access management. The paper also presents a federation protocol and discusses a prototype of our framework that implements the protocol in a federated digital library environment

Modern day enterprises exhibit a growing trend toward adoption of enterprise computing services for efficient resource utilization, scalability, and flexibility. These environments are characterized by heterogeneous, distributed computing systems exchanging enormous volumes of time-critical data with varying levels of access control in a dynamic business environment. The enterprises are thus faced with significant challenges as they endeavor to achieve their primary goals, and simultaneously ensure enterprise-wide secure interoperation among the various collaborating entities. Key among these challenges are providing effective mechanism for enforcement of enterprise policy across distributed domains, ensuring secure content-based access to enterprise resources at all user levels, and allowing the specification of temporal and nontemporal context conditions to support fine-grained dynamic access control. In this paper, we investigate these challenges, and present X-GTRBAC, an XML-based GTRBAC policy specification language and its implementation for enforcing enterprise-wide access control. Our specification language is based on the GTRBAC model that incorporates the content- and context-aware dynamic access control requirements of an enterprise. An X-GTRBAC system has been implemented as a Java application. We discuss the salient features of the specification language, and present the software architecture of our system. A comprehensive example is included to discuss and motivate the applicability of the X-GTRBAC framework to a generic enterprise environment. An application level interface for implementing the policy in the X-GTRBAC system is also provided to consolidate the ideas presented in the paper.

The modern enterprise spans several functional units or administrative domains with diverse authorization requirements. Access control policies in an enterprise environment typically express these requirements as authorization constraints. While desirable for access control, constraints can lead to conflicts in the overall policy in a multidomain environment. The administration problem for enterprise-wide access control, therefore, not only includes authorization management for users and resources within a single domain but also conflict resolution among heterogeneous access control policies of multiple domains to allow secure interoperation within the enterprise. This work presents design and implementation of X-GTRBAC Admin, an administration model that aims at enabling administration of role-based access control (RBAC) policies in the presence of constraints with support for conflict resolution in a multidomain environment. A key feature of the model is that it allows decentralization of policy administration tasks through the abstraction of administrative domains, which not only simplifies authorization management, but is also fundamental to the concept of decentralized conflict resolution presented. The paper also illustrates the applicability of the outlined administrative concepts in a realistic enterprise environment using an implementation prototype that facilitates policy administration in large enterprises.

A key challenge in Web services security is the design of effective access control schemes that can adequately meet the unique security challenges posed by the Web services paradigm. Despite the recent advances in Web based access control approaches applicable to Web services, there remain issues that impede the development of effective access control models for Web services environment. Amongst them are the lack of context-aware models for access control, and reliance on identity or capability-based access control schemes. In this paper, we motivate the design of an access control scheme that addresses these issues, and propose an extended, trust-enhanced version of our XML-based role based access control (X-RBAC) framework that incorporates context-based access control. We outline the configuration mechanism needed to apply our model to the Web services environment, and also describe the implementation architecture for the system.

Access control in enterprises is a key research area in the realm of Computer Security because of the unique needs of the target enterprise. As the enterprise typically has large user and resource pools, administering the access control based on any framework could in itself be a daunting task. This work presents X-GTRBAC Admin, an administration model that aims at enabling policy administration within a large enterprise. In particular, it simplifies the process of user-to-role and permission-to-role assignments, and thus allows decentralization of the policy administration tasks. Secondly, it also allows for specifying the domain of authority of the system administrators, and hence provides mechanism to distribute the administrative authority over multiple domains within the enterprise. The paper also illustrates the applicability of the administrative concepts presented in our framework for enterprise-wide access control.