Information assurance is at the core of every initiative that an organization executes. For online universities, a common and complex initiative is maintaining user lifecycle and providing seamless access using one identity in a large virtual infrastructure. To achieve information assurance the management of user privileges affected by events in the user's identity lifecycle needs to be the determining factor for access control. While the implementation of identity and access management systems makes this initiative feasible, it is the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure that makes it complex and challenging. The objective of this paper1 is to describe the complexities, propose a practical approach to building a foundation for consistent user experience and realizing security synthesis in online universities.
Computer Application Research based on Chinese Human Resources and Network Information Security Technology Management and Analysis In Chinese Universities
Universities have been forced to rely on remote educational technology to facilitate the rapid shift to online learning. In doing so, they acquire new risks of security vulnerabilities and privacy violations. To help universities navigate this landscape, we develop a model that describes the actors, incentives, and risks, informed by surveying 49 educators and 14 administrators at U.S. universities. Next, we develop a methodology for administrators to assess security and privacy risks of these products. We then conduct a privacy and security analysis of 23 popular platforms using a combination…
As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance accountability, transparency, and protection of privacy, academic freedom, and intellectual property. Two parallel developments in academic data collection are converging: (1) open access requirements, whereby researchers must provide access to their data as a condition of obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals; and (2) the vast accumulation of 'grey data' about individuals in their daily activities of research, te…
The broad landscape of new applications requires minimal hardware resources without any sacrifice in Quality-of-Results. Approximate Computing (AC) has emerged to meet the demands of data-rich applications. Although AC applies techniques to improve the energy efficiency of error-tolerant applications at the cost of computational accuracy, new challenges in security threats of AC should be simultaneously addressed. In this paper, we introduce the security vulnerability of the concurrent AC synthesis. We analyze the threat landscape and provide a broader view of the attack and defense strategy. …
High-level synthesis (HLS) is a key component for the hardware acceleration of applications, especially thanks to the diffusion of reconfigurable devices in many domains, from data centers to edge devices. HLS reduces development times by allowing designers to raise the abstraction level and use automated methods for hardware generation. Since security concerns are becoming more and more relevant for data-intensive applications, we investigate how to abstract security properties and use HLS for their integration with the accelerator functionality. We use the case of dynamic information flow tr…
SeClaw: Spec-Driven Security Task Synthesis for Evaluating Autonomous Agents
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Ant Digital Technologies, Ant Group（蚂蚁集团数字技术部）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Institute of Science Tokyo（东京科学研究所）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Beijing University of Technology（北京理工大学）
Correct-by-construction synthesis is a cornerstone of the confluence of formal methods and control theory towards designing safety-critical systems. Instead of following the time-tested, albeit laborious (re)design-verify-validate loop, correct-by-construction methodology advocates the use of continual refinements of formal requirements -- connected by chains of formal proofs -- to build a system that assures the correctness by design. A remarkable progress has been made in scaling the scope of applicability of correct-by-construction synthesis -- with a focus on cyber-physical systems that ti…
In network management, when it comes to security breaches, human error constitutes a dominant factor. We present our tool topoS which automatically synthesizes low-level network configurations from high-level security goals. The automation and a feedback loop help to prevent human errors. Except for a last serialization step, topoS is formally verified with Isabelle/HOL, which prevents implementation errors. In a case study, we demonstrate topoS by example. For the first time, the complete transition from high-level security goals to both firewall and SDN configurations is presented.
Numerous threats are associated with the globalized integrated circuit (IC) supply chain, such as piracy, reverse engineering, overproduction, and malicious logic insertion. Many obfuscation approaches have been proposed to mitigate these threats by preventing an adversary from fully understanding the IC (or parts of it). The use of reconfigurable elements inside an IC is a known obfuscation technique, either as a coarse grain reconfigurable block (i.e., eFPGA) or as a fine grain element (i.e., FPGA-like look-up tables). This paper presents a security-aware CAD flow that is LUT-based yet still…
The globalization of the electronics supply chain requires effective methods to thwart reverse engineering and IP theft. Logic locking is a promising solution, but there are many open concerns. First, even when applied at a higher level of abstraction, locking may result in significant overhead without improving the security metric. Second, optimizing a security metric is application-dependent and designers must evaluate and compare alternative solutions. We propose a meta-framework to optimize the use of behavioral locking during the high-level synthesis (HLS) of IP cores. Our method operates…
No Data? No Problem: Synthesizing Security Graphs for Better Intrusion Detection
Key Laboratory of High-Confidence Software Technologies (MOE), School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院高可信软件技术教育部重点实验室）；Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学计算机科学系）
Automated Template-free Synthesis of Instruction-Centric Leakage Contracts for Black-Box CPUs
IMDEA Software Institute（IMDEA软件研究所）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）；CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security（CISPA亥姆霍兹信息安全中心）；Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Information security governance (ISG) is a relatively new and under-researched topic. A review of literature shows the lack of an ISG framework or model that can help the implementation of ISG. This research aims to introduce an empirically grounded ISG process model as a practical reference to facilitate the implementation of ISG in organisations. This research has adopted an exploratory research approach where a conceptual ISG process model was proposed based on synthesis of extant literature and detailed review of relevant frameworks and models. The conceptual ISG process model was subseque…
Policy specification for personal user data is a hard problem, as it depends on many factors that cannot be predetermined by system developers. Simultaneously, systems are increasingly relying on users to make security decisions. In this paper, we propose the approach of Policy by Example (PyBE) for specifying user-specific security policies. PyBE brings the benefits of the successful approach of programming by example (PBE) for program synthesis to the policy specification domain. In PyBE, users provide policy examples that specify if actions should be allowed or denied in certain scenarios. …
May 30-June 2, 2017, Scholarship for Service (SFS) scholars at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) analyzed the security of a targeted aspect of the UMBC computer systems. During this hands-on study, with complete access to source code, students identified vulnerabilities, devised and implemented exploits, and suggested mitigations. As part of a pioneering program at UMBC to extend SFS scholarships to community colleges, the study helped initiate six students from two nearby community colleges, who transferred to UMBC in fall 2017 to complete their four-year degrees in computer…
Access-control requirements for physical spaces, like office buildings and airports, are best formulated from a global viewpoint in terms of system-wide requirements. For example, "there is an authorized path to exit the building from every room." In contrast, individual access-control components, such as doors and turnstiles, can only enforce local policies, specifying when the component may open. In practice, the gap between the system-wide, global requirements and the many local policies is bridged manually, which is tedious, error-prone, and scales poorly. We propose a framework to automat…
Information flow policies are often dynamic; the security concerns of a program will typically change during execution to reflect security-relevant events. A key challenge is how to best specify, and give proper meaning to, such dynamic policies. A large number of approaches exist that tackle that challenge, each yielding some important, but unconnected, insight. In this work we synthesise existing knowledge on dynamic policies, with an aim to establish a common terminology, best practices, and frameworks for reasoning about them. We introduce the concept of facets to illuminate subtleties in …
Speech synthesis, voice cloning, and voice conversion techniques present severe privacy and security threats to users of voice user interfaces (VUIs). These techniques transform one or more elements of a speech signal, e.g., identity and emotion, while preserving linguistic information. Adversaries may use advanced transformation tools to trigger a spoofing attack using fraudulent biometrics for a legitimate speaker. Conversely, such techniques have been used to generate privacy-transformed speech by suppressing personally identifiable attributes in the voice signals, achieving anonymization. …
