Fundamentals of Computer Security

1. Fundamentals of Computer Security Song Tan Georgia State University

2. Outline • Concepts about computer security in distributed system. • Recent studies about computer security in distributed system. • Future vision about the potential research topics.

3. Concepts

4. Secure? • A secure computer and communication system is a robust system that exhibits the characteristics of secrecy, integrity, availability, reliability and safety in the operation of the system. (Randy Chow,1997)

5. Secrecy: protection from unauthorized disclosure of system objects. • Integrity: only authorized users can modify system objects. • Availability: authorized user can have access to the corresponding authorized objects. • Reliability and safety: fault-tolerant features.

6. Risks and Threats? In a distributed system: • Open architecture and interactions across a wide range of autonomous and heterogeneous systems over open communication links. Issue: access control and user authentication. • Message passing through a communication network. Issue: protection against spoofing and forging.

7. Risks and threats? • Transparency: uniform view of a system that has transparent distribution of computation and resources. • Interoperability: the ability to have effective information exchange between hosts and between processes. Issues: Interdomain authentication, secure message transfer between domains and interdomain access control.

8. Subjects: active entities that access objects. • Objects: passive entities whose security attributes must be protected. • Access control policy: a security policy that describes how objects are to be accessed by subjects. • Flow control policy: a security policy that describes how the information flow is to be regulated.

9. Security threats and protection approaches

10. Distributed security architecture

11. Recent Studies

12. Segregate Applications at System Level to Eliminate Security Problems: resource separating and grouping mechanism that physically and logically separates system resources by adaptable scale to eliminate security problems and reduce the overall cost.

13. Security in a PKI-based networking environment: a multi-agent architecture for distributed security management system & control: An approach to design a multi-agent systemmanaging a security management system corporate memory in the form of adistributed semantic Web and describes the resulting architecture.

14. Future vision

15. Cloud Security Issues •  Assurance in service level agreements (SLA) about the users’ private data. • The security of corporate data in Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environment. • VM level attacks: VM(Virtual Machine) technology used by cloud vendors are a potential problem in multi-tenant architecture. • Enterprises have to merge cloud security policies with their own security metrics and policies.

16. References • R.Chow, T.Johnson. Distributed Operating system & Algorithm,1997. • CJ.Jone, “Segregate Applications at System Level to Eliminate Security Problems”,   Cluster Computing and the Grid Workshops, 2006. Sixth IEEE International Symposium , 2006. • Kandukuri, B.R.; Paturi, V.R.; Rakshit, A., Adv. Software Technol.” Cloud Security Issues”,  Services Computing, 2009. SCC '09. • G.A.S. Torrellas ; D.V. Cruz , Security in a PKI-based networking environment: a multi-agent architecture for distributed security management system & control,  Computational Cybernetics, 2004. ICCC 2004. • Farzad Sabahi,” Virtualization-Level Security in Cloud Computing”, Communication Software and Networks (ICCSN), 2011 

17. Thank You