A Semantic Security Framework for Systems of Systems

Abstract

Systems of systems (SoS) are dynamic coalitions of distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous systems that collaborate to achieve a common goal. While offering several advantages in terms of scalability and flexibility, the SoS paradigm has a strong impact on systems interoperability and on the security requirements of the collaborating parties. In this paper, we introduce a service-oriented security framework that protects the information exchanged among the parties in an SoS, while preserving parties' autonomy and interoperability. Confidentiality and integrity of information are protected by combining context-aware access control with trust management. Autonomy and interoperability among parties are enabled by the use of ontology-based services. More precisely, parties may refer to different ontologies to define the semantics of the terms used in their security policies and to describe domain knowledge and context information; a semantic alignment technique is then employed to map concepts from different ontologies and align the parties' vocabularies. We demonstrate the applicability of our solution by deploying a prototype implementation of the framework in an SoS in the maritime safety and security domain.

Survey on Access Control for Community-Centered Collaborative Systems

“…The term "collaborative system" in this paper is used to refer to systems that bring geographically distributed users together, supporting communication, coordination and cooperation [Bafoutsou and Mentzas 2002]. Examples of collaborative systems range from virtual organizations, supply chains and international military coalitions Trivellato et al 2013] to remote collaborative editing and programming environments [Shen and Dewan 1992] and collaborative design [Kim et al 2006]. These collaborative systems are task-centered in the sense that a group of users or organizations cooperate to accomplish a common task.…”

“…This stream has resulted in a number of coalition-based access control models [Cohen et al 2002;Phillips et al 2002;Atluri and Warner 2004;Trivellato et al 2013] and workflow-based access control models [Kang et al 2001;Wainer et al 2003]. These models usually extend earlier access control models like RBAC, TBAC and TMAC to address requirements typical of inter-organizational resource sharing.…”

SAFAX – An Extensible Authorization Service for Cloud Environments

“…Standards are often used to smooth these differences and, thus, to enable interoperability in distributed systems. The use of standards, however, does not solve the problem of semantic misalignment of providers' vocabularies (Trivellato et al, 2013). For instance, Google Cloud Storage uses element "role" to indicate the action that a data consumer is allowed to perform (see Figure 2A).…”

A Security Policy Infrastructure for Tactical Service Oriented Architectures

“…A parallel evaluation between the identified functional policy requirements and the constraints imposed by the nature of tactical SOA, was undertaken for the examination of suitable security policy frameworks. This examination included commonly used mechanisms, such as WS -Security, SAML [5], XACML [6] and Ponder [7], as well as recent semantic (REI [8], KAOS [9], ROWLBAC [10], Kolter et al [11], Trivellato et al [12]) and trust management frameworks (cassandra [13], Tulip [14], RT [15], Peer-Trust [16]). This analysis promoted the use of web ontology language (OWL) as the most suitable solution in respect to the requirements of tactical SOA.…”