With the surge of data breaches, practitioner ignorance and unprotected hardware, secure information management in healthcare environments is becoming a challenging problem. In the context of healthcare systems, confidentiality of patient data is of particular sensitivity. For economic reasons, cloud services are spreading, but there is still no clear solution to the problem of truly secure data storage at a remote location. To tackle this issue, we first examine if it is possible to have a secure storage of healthcare data without fully relying on trusted third-parties, and without impeding system usability on the side of the caregivers. The novelty of this approach is that it offers a standard-based deployable solution tailored for healthcare scenarios, using cloud services, but where trust is shifted from the cloud provider to the healthcare institution. This approach is unlike state-of-the-art solutions: there are secure cloud storage solutions that insist on having no knowledge of the stored data, but we discovered that they still require too much trust to manage user credentials, these credentials actually give them access to confidential data. In the paper, we present SPARER as a solution to the secure cloud storage problem and discuss the trade-offs of our approach. Moreover, we look at performance benchmarks that can hint to the feasibility and cost of using off-the-shelf cryptographic tools as building blocks in SPARER.

Smart and wearable devices are trendy electronic objects that have become increasingly popular in recent years. Those devices are, by definition, tightly connected with the user's personal activities. Authentication is therefore a critical feature for both identifying users and personalizing the services on the device. In particular, the emergence of smartglasses changed the way we thought a wearable could assist users in their daily activities. As designed by commercial providers, smartglasses are sold with a very specific set of interactions capabilities. These capabilities have a strong impact on how comfortably or safely users may authenticate to their smartglasses. For this reason, we investigate in this paper the different authentication methods available for smartphones and we comparatively position the smartglasses in the design space of authentication methods. We propose a new approach based on touch input on an arbitrary surface using thermal camera input. This approach aims to circumvent the lack of touch surface provided by smartglasses, while maintaining an acceptable level of security.

Despite the rapid pace of gadgets released on the market, research in the area of usable interfaces for wearables is lagging behind. Smartglasses are new wearables that embed diverse sensors but also have small displays, and this makes it hard for the wearer to visualize real-time data. To bridge this gap, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we propose a data representation model to combine applications and services that match user activities and contexts. Second, we present an approach of showing relevant services to the user based on `tiles' (such as those in recent Microsoft Windows interfaces) while considering the device constraints. Finally, we suggest that combining those two aspects can open the way to personalized services for the end user, creating new ways of interacting with applications and devices.

Despite increasing deployment of software-defined networks (SDN), little is yet known about how to actually manage such kind of networks. When service degradation (generically termed here “trouble”) happens, the first step is to localise under-performing network paths (“troubleshooting”). SDN-RADAR gives a novel approach to ease large network troubleshooting by leveraging SDN features and incorporating distributed monitoring of network traffic. The demo shows how the SDN-RADAR tool can help network administrators understand which is the most likely faulty network link.

Software-defined deployments are growing into data center and enterprise network infrastructures. The typical promises of software-defined networks (SDN) are improved time for market, decreased risk and operational costs for services, flexibility and unified management. However, little is known and shared about how to actually manage an SDN network, especially in localising underperforming network paths (what we call “troubleshooting”). We describe a novel approach to ease large network troubleshooting by leveraging SDN features and incorporating distributed monitoring of network traffic. We suggest SDN-RADAR, a tool that can help network administrators understand which is the most likely faulty network link. To the best of our knowledge this is the first troubleshooting solution that combines user-side performance measurements with network data extracted from the SDN controller.

Using personal mobile devices for work gave rise to a trend called "bring your own device", or BYOD. BYOD brings a productivity boost for employees, but also headaches for employers: on the one hand, the business has a legitimate interest in monitoring the device, in order to prevent security breaches by employees; but on the other hand, employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they use their devices for private functions. This poster presents our project called Privacy-Preserving Accountability for peRsonal Devices (PriPARD, pronounced "prepared"). PriPARD addresses the tension described above by designing and evaluating concrete privacy mechanisms for mobile devices used in a corporate environment. Instead of imposing a "privacy firewall" between users and the Internet, in PriPARD the aim is protecting user privacy within the corporate network and non-disclosure outside this network. PriPARD's vision is to gather practical experience with the tradeoffs between monitoring and privacy needs, to help both mobile device users and managers of corporate networks.

Many security job ads mention that security certificates are regarded as assets, giving the candidate an advantage. For some high-profile jobs, certification may even be required.No matter where one stands on the subject of certification, the assumption is that the imparted knowledge is at least factually correct. We examine the cryptography section in the Common Body of Knowledge (CBK) underlying the most sought-after certification, the CISSP, issued by the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, Inc., or "ISC^2".

In this paper we present Trishul-UCON (T-UCON), a DRM system based on the UCON_ABC model. T-UCON is designed to be capable of enforcing not only application-specific policies, as any existing software-based DRM solution does, but also DRM policies across applications. This is achieved by binding the DRM policy only to the content it protects with no relations to the application(s) which will use this content. Furthermore, to guarantee that the policy is continuously enforced, we designed T-UCON as a JVM-based middleware that mediates the usage requests of any Java application to the protected content. Each request is granted or denied according to the content policy. We illustrate the unique features of T-UCON by using typical examples of DRM policies such as the pay-per-use and the use only N times scenarios. Preliminary results on the overhead of our solution are also provided.