Network Policy Enforcement Using Transactions

Thomsen, Dan; Bertino, Elisa

doi:10.1145/3205977.3206000

Cited by 4 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Good design takes security, ease of access, and usability into account, striking a balance between protecting the system and ease of use. Good practice has evolved a number of practical approaches like minimizing attack surface area [7], establish secure defaults [8], using the principle of defence in depth [9], not trusting services [10], keeping security simple [11], and fixing security issues correctly [12].These approaches are used for maintaining and improving security which are so natural and important that they should be adopted as a first layer of protection as a matter of standard practice, even when more sophisticated approaches are also in use [13].…”

Section: A Good Security Design Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Experiments and Proofs in Web-service Security

Sheniar

Hadaad

Addie

et al. 2018

2018 28th International Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (ITNAC)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many web services have a subsystem for allowing users to register, authenticate, reset their password, and change personal details. It is important that such subsystems cannot be abused by attackers to gain access to the accounts of other users. We study a system which was initially prone to such attacks. Specific attacks are demonstrated and the system is then modified to prevent such attacks in future. The design achieved in this way is then analysed to show that it can't be broken in future unless users allow their email to be intercepted. This is achieved by formulating the requirement as a statement of the user's expectations of the system and then analysing the source code of the system to prove that it meets these requirements. The process of attack, correction, and formulation of security rules, and proof that rules hold, is proposed as a methodical security design philosophy.

show abstract

Section: A Good Security Design Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Experiments and Proofs in Web-service Security

Sheniar

Hadaad

Addie

et al. 2018

2018 28th International Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (ITNAC)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Network functionalities include not only the communication expected by a user but many unexpected communications. For example, booking an Uber ride contacts at least eight different hosts on the Internet and network support functions [34].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, busy network administrators find detailed permission management a daunting and time-consuming task [34]. First, the communication requirements of assets (e.g., services, devices, virtual and cloud components, applications, infrastructure components) and users need to be well understood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Accurately translating static and local policies into rules enforced in the underlying domain network is fundamental for successfully building a ZTA and enforcing a least privilege policy. As manual policy translation is generally not scalable and is a significantly error-prone process [2,3,7,11,15], our prior work [34] has proposed the idea of a network-wide security policy compiler. The compiler receives the static and local policy specifications as input, Here, application developers define tasks and a task hierarchy that the local system administrator can incorporate into their local policies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As the complexity of networks increases, tools for the impact analysis of policy changes are critical as the impact is often unclear even to the administrators performing the changes [14,18], and these changes may cause unintended failures. For example, an administrator can alter the existing policies by retracting rarely used permissions from the network [34]. In this case, SPRT aims to assess whether the impact of such a policy action may cause unintended failures and identify the service that will fail.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Can I Reach You? Do I Need To? New Semantics in Security Policy Specification and Testing

Katsis

Cicala

Thomsen

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The zero trust principle only allows authorized and authenticated actions in a computer network. A network policy satisfies the least privilege principle by minimizing the network permissions to only those needed by users and applications. However, administrators face many challenges in creating a least privilege policy since it requires a detailed understanding of the network topology and knowing the communication requirements of every network application and user. This paper addresses those challenges by introducing a graph-based policy specification framework to capture a network's communication requirements and a network compiler that turns those requirements into an enforceable policy. To offset the effort of building such a stringent policy, we incorporate patterns to spread the work of policy creation over time and people. In the paper, we first elaborate on how our framework's semantics enhances network security and resilience. We then introduce a Security Policy Regression Testing tool (SPRT), which leverages our framework's semantics, to test and reason about consistency, correctness, and relevance of network security policies. Finally, we outline relevant research directions. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Access control; Authorization; Network security; Domain-specific security and privacy architectures.

show abstract