Cyber education development is a crucial issue considering the human resource and skill shortage in the current cybersecurity arena. A cyber range is a tried and tested hands-on training in cybersecurity education, providing threat simulation of various scenarios. However, the threat scenario development poses crucial challenges that hurt the learning process and trainee's engagement in training. Firstly, the threat scenarios are static and have limited applicability. Secondly, due to the lack of proper representation of procedures and training scenarios used in attacks, it is hard to recognize redundant procedures. We propose an Attack Specific Language (ASL) based on the Mitre ATT&CK framework. It provides one representation for all threat scenarios. This language will give information about attack techniques in compact ways, which will streamline and automate the cyber range functions of threat and challenge execution. It will help identify and reduce redundancy. ASL will also provide training customization through dynamic threat execution, which will be trainee-aware and will consider the trainee's performance while executing scenarios. It will provide trainees, better engagement, and training experience.

With advances in fog and edge computing, various problems such as data processing for large Internet of Things (IoT) systems can be solved in an efficient manner. One such problem for the next generation smart grid (SG) IoT system comprising of millions of smart devices is the data aggregation problem. Traditional data aggregation schemes for SGs incur high computation and communication costs, and in recent years, there have been efforts to leverage fog computing with SGs to overcome these limitations. In this article, a new fog-enabled privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme (FESDA) is proposed. Unlike existing schemes, the proposed scheme is resilient to false data injection attacks by filtering out the inserted values from external attackers. To achieve privacy, a modified version of the Paillier cryptosystem is used to encrypt the consumption data of the smart meter (SM) users. In addition, FESDA is fault-tolerant, which means, the collection of data from other devices will not be affected even if some of the SMs malfunction. We evaluate its performance along with three other competing schemes in terms of aggregation, decryption, and communication costs. The findings demonstrate that FESDA reduces the communication cost by 50%, when compared with the privacy-preserving fog-enabled data aggregation scheme.

Sharing of resources on the cloud can be achieved on a large scale, since it is cost effective and location independent. Despite the hype surrounding cloud computing, organizations are still reluctant to deploy their businesses in the cloud computing environment due to concerns in secure resource sharing. In this paper, we propose a cloud resource mediation service offered by cloud service providers, which plays the role of trusted third party among its different tenants. This paper formally specifies the resource sharing mechanism between two different tenants in the presence of our proposed cloud resource mediation service. The correctness of permission activation and delegation mechanism among different tenants using four distinct algorithms (activation, delegation, forward revocation, and backward revocation) is also demonstrated using formal verification. The performance analysis suggests that the sharing of resources can be performed securely and efficiently across different tenants of the cloud.

Service-oriented architecture offers a flexible paradigm for information flow among collaborating organizations. As information moves out of an organization boundary, various security concerns may arise, such as confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity that needs to be addressed. Moreover, verifying the correctness of the communication protocol is also an important factor. This paper focuses on the formal verification of the xDAuth protocol, which is one of the prominent protocols for identity management in cross domain scenarios. We have modeled the information flow of xDAuth protocol using high-level Petri nets to understand the protocol information flow in a distributed environment. We analyze the rules of information flow using Z language, while Z3 SMT solver is used for the verification of the model. Our formal analysis and verification results reveal the fact that the protocol fulfills its intended purpose and provides the security for the defined protocol specific properties, e.g., secure secret key authentication, and Chinese wall security policy and secrecy specific properties, e.g., confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity.

ABSTRACT This paper has been written as a part of the research project that is working towards the implementation of dynamic behavioral attestation for mobile platforms. The motivation behind this paper was to analyze the existing remote attestation techniques in order to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. We have analyzed Integrity Measurement Architecture, Policy‐reduced Integrity Measurement Architecture, Property‐based Attestation, Remote Attestation on Program Execution, Semantic Remote Attestation, Trustable Remote Verification of Web Services, and Model‐based Behavior Attestation. Each of the existing remote attestation techniques was found to be effective in some situations but was found to be infeasible in others. Therefore, a new remote attestation technique is needed, which is platform independent and flexible enough to meet the challenges of today's scalable computing environments. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cross domain resource sharing and collaborations have become pervasive in today's service oriented organizations. Existing approaches for the realization of cross domain access control are either focused on the model level only without concrete implementation mechanisms, or not general enough to provide a flexible framework for enterprise web applications. In this paper, we present xDAuth, a framework for the realization of cross domain access control and delegation with RESTful web service architecture. While focusing on real issues under the context of cross domain access scenarios such as no predefined trust relationship between a service provider domain and service requestor domain, xDAuth leverages existing web technologies to realize desired security requirements while supporting flexible and scalable security policies and privacy protection with low performance overhead. We have implemented xDAuth in a medical module in OpenERP, an open source ERP system. Our evaluation demonstrates that xDAuth is a feasible framework towards general cross domain access control for service oriented architectures.

Mashups are a new breed of interactive web applications that aggregate and stitch together data retrieved from one or more sources to create an entirely new and innovative set of services. The paradigm is not limited to social networks and many enterprises are redesigning their business processes to create interactive systems in the form of mashups. However, protecting users' private data from unauthorized access in mashups is a challenging security problem. Existing solutions for addressing the various authorization problems are limited due to all-or-nothing policy, third party dependence and scalability issues. In this paper, we present a general permission delegation model for mashups that is fine-grained, user centric and scalable. This contribution has the following objectives: We formally specify the dependency relationships among multiple web applications. Dependency relationships are categorized on the basis of specific data items. We present an extensible reference architecture for configuring multiple web applications and a session management protocol.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural paradigm that enables dynamic composition of heterogeneous, independent, multi-vendor business services. A prerequisite for such inter-organizational workflows is the establishment of trustworthiness, which is mostly achieved through non-technical measures such as legislation, and/or social consent that businesses, or organizations simply pledge themselves to adhere. In our viewpoint, a business process can only be trustworthy if the behavior of all services in it is trustworthy. Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has defined an open set of specifications for the establishment of trustworthiness through a hardware root-of-trust. This paper has three objectives: firstly, the behavior of individual services in a business process is formally specified. Secondly, in order to overcome the inherent weaknesses of trust management through software alone, a hardware root of-trust devised by the TCG, is used for the measurement of the behavior of individual services in a business process. Finally, a verification mechanism is detailed through which the trustworthiness of a business process can be verified.

Continuous access control after an object is released into a distributed environment has been regarded as the usage control problem and has been investigated by different researchers in various papers. However, the enabling technology for usage control is a challenging problem and the space has not been fully explored yet. In this paper we identify the general requirements of a trusted usage control enforcement in heterogeneous computing environments, and also propose a general platform architecture to meet these requirements.

Remote attestation is an important characteristic of trusted computing technology which provides reliable evidence that a trusted environment actually exists. Existing approaches for the realization of remote attestation measure the trustworthiness of a target platform from its binaries, configurations, properties or security policies. All these approaches are low-level attestation techniques only, and none of them define what a trusted behavior actually is and how to specify it. In this paper, we present a novel approach where the trustworthiness of a platform is associated with the behavior of a policy model. In our approach, the behavior of a policy model is attested rather than a software or hardware platform. Thus, the attestation feature is not tied to a specific software or hardware platform, or to a particular remote attestation technique, or to an individual type of security policy. We select usage control (UCON) as our target policy model as it is a comprehensive and exible model. We propose a framework to identify, specify, and attest different behaviors of UCON.

Existing approaches for Trust Management through software alone - by their very principle - are uncompromising and have inherent weaknesses. Once the information leaves the service provider platform, there is no way to guarantee the integrity of the information on the client (or service requestor) platform. The Trusted Computing Group proposed a quantum leap in security, a hardware based "root of trust" by which the integrity of a platform - be a client or service provider can be verified. However, there is no approach for the integration of this novel but essentially straight forward concept into the distributed application development. We believe that the complexity of Trusted Computing (TC) is one of the key factors that will hinder its successful integration within the web services based distributed application realm. Model-driven techniques offer a promising approach to alleviate the complexity of platforms. This contribution has three objectives. First, we detail SECTET - a model-driven framework for leveraging TC concepts at a higher level of abstraction. We secondly elaborate the integration of platform-independent XACML policies with the platform-specific SELinux policies. Thirdly, we share our experiences regarding the implementation results of the SECTET on TC based systems.