Package management systems play an essential role in pursuing systems dependability by ensuring that software is correctly installed and kept up-to-date according to vendor-defined installation policies. Circumventing such policies could make the system unhealthy and insecure and can constitute a serious security threat. In many application scenarios, e.g., distribution of commercial software, the confidentiality of the software must be guaranteed against non-authorized players. In some cases, the installation policy itself is considered a sensitive information, e.g., when it reveals required hardware in military contexts. In this paper we address the problem of strongly enforcing software dependencies in package management systems, to prevent that a malicious user forces the system to install any package despite its requirements are not completely fulfilled. The enforcement is strong in the sense that the encrypted software package cannot be even decrypted if the dependencies are not satisfied. Once a new package is decrypted and installed, our protocol non-interactively updates the key material on the target device. This key update will allow the decryption of further packages that depend on the newly installed one. We further present “policy-hiding” variants of our protocol. Finally we provide an experimental evaluation of the system performance.

In this paper we address the problem of enforcing data access control over the storage area of a mobile device running different and independent third party applications. To this end, we present the design of a general purpose secure file system that allows to guarantee file-grained data confidentiality at OS level. Data encryption, key management and policy enforcement are based on Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) facilities. We describe a prototype implementation and discuss preliminary performance results.

This paper presents and discusses an Enterprise Rights Management System (ERM) tailored for remote maintenance facilities which features secure on-site documentation storage and availability, strong data provider control over access policy and their enforcement, minimal documentation disclosure and strong and ergonomic operator authentication by means of biometric measurements. The design approach pursues the technological neutrality with respect to the documentation format and operator side equipments.

It is often observed that agents tend to imitate the behavior of their neighbors in a social network. This imitating behavior might lead to the strategic decision of adopting a public behavior that differs from what the agent believes is the right one and this can subvert the behavior of the population as a whole. In this paper, we consider the case in which agents express preferences over two alternatives and model social pressure with the majority dynamics: at each step an agent is selected and its preference is replaced by the majority of the preferences of her neighbors. In case of a tie, the agent does not change her current preference. A profile of the agents’ preferences is stable if the each agent’s preference coincides with the preference of at least half of the neighbors (thus, the system is in equilibrium). We ask whether there are network topologies that are robust to social pressure. That is, we ask whether there are graphs in which the majority of preferences in an initial profile $${\mathbf {s}}$$ always coincides with the majority of the preference in all stable profiles reachable from $${\mathbf {s}}$$ . We completely characterize the graphs with this robustness property by showing that this is possible only if the graph has no edge or is a clique or very close to a clique. In other words, except for this handful of graphs, every graph admits at least one initial profile of preferences in which the majority dynamics can subvert the initial majority. We also show that deciding whether a graph admits a minority that becomes majority is NP-hard when the minority size is at most 1 / 4-th of the social network size.

Context-aware access control systems should reactively adapt access control decisions to dynamic environmental conditions. In this paper we present ERBAC – an event-driven extension of the TRBAC model that allows the specification and enforcement of general reactive policies – and its implementation. While almost all the individual features of ERBAC occur separately in some previous model, the detailed design of the policy language, its implementation in XACML, and its testing contribute to the development of expressive, event-driven policy frameworks by demonstrating that this rich model can be satisfactorily implemented, and that its expressivity and performance are compatible with a variety of realistic application scenarios. In particular, a number of examples illustrate ERBAC’s expressive power, and its ability of handling exceptional situations in a flexible way, while keeping policies compact and manageable. The prototype extends XACML’s language and the implementation of the PDP to support the new model. Systematic scalability experiments show that the computational cost of policy rule evaluation in ERBAC is compatible with real-world applications.

Context-aware access control systems should reactively adapt access control decisions to dynamic environmental conditions. In this paper we present an extension of the TRBAC model that allows the specification and enforcement of general reactive policies. Then we extend XACML to support the new model, and illustrate a prototype implementation of the PDP.

This paper deals with the access control problem. We assume that valuable resources need to be protected against unauthorized users and that, to this aim, a password-based access control scheme is employed. Such an abstract scenario captures many applicative settings. The issue we focus our attention on is the following: password-based schemes provide a certain level of security as long as users choose good passwords, i.e., passwords that are hard to guess in a reasonable amount of time. In order to force the users to make good choices, a proactive password checker can be implemented as a submodule of the access control scheme. Such a checker, any time the user chooses/changes his own password, decides on the fly whether to accept or refuse the new password, depending on its guessability. Hence, the question is: how can we get an effective and efficient proactive password checker? By means of neural networks and statistical techniques, we answer the above question, developing suitable proactive password checkers. Through a series of experiments, we show that these checkers have very good performance: error rates are comparable to those of the best existing checkers, implemented on different principles and by using other methodologies, and the memory requirements are better in several cases. It is the first time that neural network technology has been fully and successfully applied to designing proactive password checkers

Information hiding techniques allow a player to hide secret information in some innocent-looking document. In this paper we present a novel approach to information hiding. We investigate the possibility of embedding information using the intrinsic entropy of some classes of cover-documents. In particular we provide algorithms for embedding any binary string in an image mosaic (i.e. an image consisting of a mosaic of smaller images). The algorithms presented allow different levels of security for the information hidden in the cover-document. We also show some techniques to reduce the amount of information the users have to secretly store.