Security is an important barrier to wide adoption of distributed systems for sensitive data storage and management. In particular, one unsolved problem is to ensure that customers data protection policies are honored, regardless of where the data is physically stored and how often it is accessed, modified, and duplicated. This issue calls for two requirements to be satisfied. First, data should be managed in accordance to both owners' preferences and to the local regulations that may apply. Second, although multiple copies may exist, a consistent view across copies should be maintained. Toward addressing these issues, in this work we propose innovative policy enforcement techniques for adaptive sharing of users' outsourced data. We introduce the notion of autonomous self-controlling objects (SCO), that by means of object-oriented programming techniques, encapsulate sensitive resources and assure their protection by means of adaptive security policies of various granularity, and synchronization protocols. Through extensive evaluation, we show that our approach is effective and efficiently manages multiple data copies.
No abstract
The size and complexity of modern applications are the underlying causes of numerous security vulnerabilities. In order to mitigate the risks arising from such vulnerabilities, various techniques have been proposed to isolate the execution of sensitive code from the rest of the application and from other software on the platform (such as the operating system). New technologies, notably Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), are becoming available to enhance the security of partitioned applications. SGX provides a trusted execution environment (TEE), called an enclave, that protects the integrity of the code and the confidentiality of the data inside it from other software, including the operating system. However, even with these partitioning techniques, it is not immediately clear exactly how they can and should be used to partition applications. How should a particular application be partitioned? How many TEEs should be used? What granularity of partitioning should be applied? To some extent, this is dependent on the capabilities and performance of the partitioning technology in use. However, as partitioning becomes increasingly common, there is a need for systematization in the design of partitioning schemes. To address this need, we present a novel framework consisting of four overarching types of partitioning schemes through which applications can make use of TEEs. These schemes range from coarse-grained partitioning, in which the whole application is included in a single TEE, through to ultra-fine partitioning, in which each piece of security-sensitive code and data is protected in an individual TEE. Although partitioning schemes themselves are application-specific, we establish application-independent relationships between the types we have defined. Since these relationships have an impact on both the security and performance of the partitioning scheme, we envisage that our framework can be used by software architects to guide the design of application partitioning schemes. To demonstrate the applicability of our framework, we have carried out case studies on two widely-used software packages, the Apache web server and the OpenSSL library. In each case study, we provide four high level partitioning schemes -one for each of the types in our framework. We also systematically review the related work on hardware-enforced partitioning by categorising previous research efforts according to our framework.
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