ICS Facilitating Inaugural ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy

The Institute for Cyber Security will be facilitating a conference for the SIGSAC in the Association of Computing Machinery in February 2011 in San Antonio, Texas. The conference, called the Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (Or CODASPY) will cover topics on cyber security, data privacy, access control, and other fields related to security.

See the announcement below, and at the the CODASPY site.

1st ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy

February 2011, San Antonio, Texas
Pending ACM Approval

Announcement: ACM SIGSAC announces the creation of a new annual ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security. The inaugural conference will be held in February 2011 in San Antonio, Texas (exact dates and hotel to be announced). With rapid global penetration of the Internet and smart phones and the resulting productivity and social gains, the world is becoming increasingly dependent on its cyber infrastructure. Criminals, spies and predators of all kinds have learnt to exploit this landscape much quicker than defenders have advanced in their technologies. Security and Privacy has become an essential concern of applications and systems throughout their lifecycle. Security concerns have rapidly moved up the software stack as the Internet and web have matured. The security, privacy, functionality, cost and usability tradeoffs necessary in any practical system can only be effectively achieved at the data and application layers. This new conference provides a dedicated venue for high-quality research in this arena, and seeks to foster a community with this focus in cyber security.

Scope: Data and the applications that manipulate data are the crucial assets in today's information age. With the increasing drive towards availability of data and services anytime anywhere, security and privacy risks have increased. Vast amounts of privacy-sensitive data are being collected today by organizations for a variety of reasons. Unauthorized disclosure, modification, usage or denial of access to these data and corresponding services may result in high human and financial costs. New applications such as social networking and social computing provide value by aggregating input from numerous individual users and/or the mobile devices they carry with them and computing new information of value to society and individuals. To achieve efficiency and effectiveness in traditional domains such as healthcare there is a drive to make these records electronic and highly available. The need for organizations and government agencies to share information effectively is underscored by rapid innovations in the business world that require close collaboration across traditional boundaries and the dramatic failure of old-style approaches to information protection in government agencies in keeping information too secret to connect the dots. Security and privacy in these and other arenas can be meaningfully achieved only in context of the application domain. Data and applications security and privacy has rapidly expanded as a research field with many important challenges to be addressed. The goal of the conference is to discuss novel exciting research topics in data and application security and privacy and to lay out directions for further research and development in this area. The conference seeks submissions from diverse communities, including corporate and academic researchers, open source projects, standardization bodies, governments, system and security administrators, software engineers and application domain experts.

Topics: Include but not limited to

• Application layer security policies
• Authorization /Access Control for Applications
• Authorization/Access Control for Databases
• Data dissemination controls
• Data forensics
• Enforcement layer security policies
• Privacy preserving techniques
• Private information retrieval
• Search on protected/encrypted data
• Secure auditing
• Secure collaboration
• Secure data provenance
• Secure electronic commerce
• Secure information sharing
• Secure knowledge management
• Secure multiparty computations
• Secure software development
• Securing data/apps on untrusted platforms
• Securing the semantic web
• Security and Privacy in GIS/Spatial Data
• Security and Privacy in Healthcare
• Security policies for databases
• Social computing security and privacy
• Social networking security and privacy
• Application, data and user trust metrics
• Web application security

General Chair: Ravi Sandhu, Institute for Cyber Security (ICS), University of Texas at San Antonio

Program Chair: Elisa Bertino, Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), Purdue U.

Local Arrangements Chair: Jeffrey Reich, Institute for Cyber Security (ICS), University of Texas at San Antonio

Program Committee: To be announced

Conference Web Site: www.codaspy.org

Important Dates: To be announced

Interested Volunteers: Contact Ravi Sandhu at ravi.sandhu@utsa.edu or Elisa Bertino at bertino@purdue.edu as appropriate

Erhan J. Kartaltepe, PMP
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

ICS in the News: Ravi Sandhu Interviewed by SC Magazine and San Antonio Busiess Journal

Ravi Sandhu, executive director for the Institute for Cyber Security, was interviewed in an article by SC Magazine yesterday on risk management and security assurance. From the article:

"Just deploying products that have achieved a certain level of security doesn't mean your overall system is going to be secure. Let's say you buy a product that does encryption. Encryption can be very strong and resistant to cryptographic attacks, but if you don't manage the keys, your overall system can be compromised...At the end of the day, security is about risk management and risk mitigation at the system level.

Additionally, Ravi was interviewed today by the San Antonio Business Journal on extending the reach of cyber security. From the article:

“Ultimately, (cyber security) will have to develop as a separate field,” Sandhu says. “Right now it is embedded within the computer science field, but it needs to be treated as a discipline by itself.” Sandhu also says most computer science graduates today are coming out with very superficial knowledge of cyber security. Because the field of cyber security is changing and evolving at such a rapid pace, it is not enough for universities to be teaching just the old ideas about cyber security.

For more on ICS's work on risk management, cyber security and assurance, visit the ICS site.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Cyber Security Awareness Week at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University

It's Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. This seems like as good a week as any to raise awareness of cyber security, so the Institute for Cyber Security shall in spirit celebrate this week as well. :-)

Last year, 500 students competed in these challenges, and their sixth annual CSAW looks to trump that--they've alread taking registration for their annual competition, which will unfold over the next couple of months. The challenges pit high school, college, and graduate students against each other in a series of cyber-security-related competitions, which includes analyzing an infected hardware platform, detecting application security vulnerabilities, and solving a fictional murder mystery using digital forensics.

Their main site and Facebook page has more information on their contest, and prizes include cash and scholarships, as well as travel grants. This is a great idea and looks like a fantastic way to engage students in studying or even pursuing cyber security. Best of luck to all participants!

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

ICS Startup SafeMashups Named Top 11 Security Company to Watch

SafeMashups, Inc., the latest startup from the Institute for Cyber Security Incubator to go live, has been named one of the eleven security companies to watch by NetworkWorld.

According to the article, SafeMashups is worth watching because its free Web Toolkit and SafeMashups Community Service can change today's mashups' lack of security controls. MashSSL is a protocol to allow one web app to talk to another through a browser in "mashups. There is a neat accompanying slideshow as well.

Look for more from SafeMashups in the coming months!

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

SafeMashups and Kerberos Interoperability Mention on Microsoft's Interoperability Site

The MIT Kerberos Consortium held its first Interoperability Testing Workshop a few weeks ago, hosted by Microsoft Corporation on their Redmond, Washington campus. Representatives from MIT, Microsoft, Sun, Cornell, and the Institute for Cyber Security were in attendance, with a lot of folks interested in Kerberos and trust security participating. The slide deck from our talk at the is now up online.

Microsoft's Interoperability Site has a great article covering some of the background and collaboration of the event. ICS was there with its first startup, SafeMashups, Inc., to introduce MashSSL and how the protocol can seamlessly work with Kerberos. As a supplement to Jean-Christophe Cimetiere's interesting coverage, SafeMashups also discussed MashSSL as a new standard for establishing trust in mashups and how it can provide application-level trust for Kerberized web applications, and non-Kerberized applications that want to make use of a KDC.

For those interested in the Safemashups solution to Kerberize web applications, a new tutorial on mashing MashSSL with Kerberos on its YouTube channel. Other demos on mashing MashSSL with OpenAJAX, Flash, OAuth, and Cross-Domain XHR, and more can be found there, too.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

DigiCert and SafeMashups Partner to Secure Web 2.0 Protocols

SafeMashups, Inc., the latest startup from the Institute for Cyber Security to go live, has teamed up with DigiCert to further secure web 2.0 protocols. DigiCert is a large provider of SSL certificates and now interoperates with SafeMashup's free Web Toolkit and SafeMashups Community Service.

As Ravi Ganesan, founder and CEO of SafeMashups states, "The recent session fixation vulnerability discovered in OAuth is a perfect example of the sort of vulnerabilities that arise when two web services have to communicate via a potentially untrusted user. " Luckily, both companies reiterated their commitment to work through the standards process with other partners to make the MashSSL specification an open standard.

For more about the recent OAuth security hole that exposed a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in Twitter and how MashSSL can be used as a workaround to it, visit our post on the subject here.

Look for more good news from SafeMashups soon!

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Ruminations on the Recent OAuth Security Issue

You may have heard about the recent OAuth security hole that left Twitter vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. The first response someone looking at the details of the attack and its high media coverage might be to throw up their hands and give up on OAuth altogether.

This is to the wrong way to look at these recent events. The OAuth specification is a great one. Like all great standards, it is easy to read and simple to implement. For example, one of the developers here at the Institute for Cyber Security wrote a robust Java implementation of it in three days from his first look at the specification; there just are not many specs that do something so useful but can be put into practice so easily.

What needs to be understood is that this is exactly how the crypto protocols process works. Any standard worth its salt takes years and years to mature. As an example, SSL was first developed in 1993; people far smarter than I are still improving it a decade and a half later! Yet no one would argue that SSL is not a secure or well-thought-out spec. The fact that this attack even detected shows OAuth is under scrutiny and is gaining traction, which is really a good thing for OAuth. Would you rather use a spec which smart people are trying to break, or a no name spec that only the "wrong smart people" know how to break.

In the end, we do not know what OAuth's fix to this vulnerability will be, but if developers want a quick solution, they may want to consider using the MashSSL protocol that ICS developed with SafeMashups. SafeMashups is our most mature company in incubation, and integrates with OAuth. as well as other popular Web 2.0 standards.

MashSSL a multi-party version of SSL running in the application layer, and from an OAuth-centric standpoint, MashSSL first runs between the Consumer and the Service Provider through the user's browser (using standard SSL certificates for each server; no certificate on the browser is needed or expected). We then set the OAuth credential type to "PLAINTEXT", but all the OAuth messages are encrypted with the SSL "master secret" (the session key the two parties share at end of any SSL session). Except for the first go-round which involves public key operations, all subsequent sessions use the SSL abbreviated handshake, which is very efficient and only uses symmetric key crypto. The session fixation attack will not work as the Service Provider won't operate with a site with which it cannot establish or share an SSL session. So when the "good" URL is moved to "bad" site (as in this OAuth vulnerability), the attack is detected and stopped.

More info on how OAuth can interoperate with MashSSL can be found here. Additionally, a video on MashSSL/OAuth interoperation can be found on the SafeMashups YouTube channel. and in the the education center on the SafeMashups site.

Disclaimers:

1. MashSSL is moving towards becoming an open standard, but is not there yet (and I suppose that there is an infinitely small but non-zero probability that it may not, although the more people that cloamor for it, the sooner that will occur).
2. The software though is available under a perpetual royalty free license so you do not have to pay anything to use it.
3. At the moment it only works with certs from VeriSign (and our own free CA which we absolutely do NOT recommend you use except for testing).

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Image is a graph of SSL's growth over time. Just as SSL was improved via a battery of tests over time, new cryptographic protocols like OAuth can certainly persevere to become ubiquitous standards.

ICS Startup SafeMashups Inc. Adobe Flash Demo Tutorial Online

SafeMashups, Inc., the latest startup from the Institute for Cyber Security to go live, has released a new tutorial on mashing Adobe Flash applications with MashSSL on its YouTube channel. Other demos on mashing MashSSL with OpenAJAX, Kerberos, OAuth, and Cross-Domain XHR, and more can be found there, too.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Interoperability Testing Workshop Slide Deck Online

The MIT Kerberos Consortium held its first Interoperability Testing Workshop this week, hosted by Microsoft Corporation on their Redmond, Washington campus. Representatives from MIT, Microsoft, Sun, Cornell, and the Institute for Cyber Security were in attendance, with a lot of folks interested in Kerberos and trust security participating. The slide deck from our talk at the is now up online.

ICS was there with its first startup, SafeMashups, Inc., to introduce MashSSL and how the protocol can seamlessly work with Kerberos. Our talk discusses MashSSL as a new standard for establishing trust in mashups and how it can provide application-level trust for Kerberized web applications, and non-Kerberized applications that want to make use of a KDC.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

TRISC Conference Slide Deck Online

The slide deck from my talk at the Texas Regional Infrastructure Security Conference (TRISC) is now up online.

The talk discusses MashSSL as a new standard for establishing trust in mashups. MashSSL is the core product from SafeMashups, Inc., the first startup from the ICS Incubator to go live.

If your applications use cross-domain XHR, OpenAJAX, OAuth, Kerberos, or other technologies, then this talk can help you secure your applications at the application level, even through the browser.

At TRISC 2009: I'm explaining MashSSL to a riveted audience!

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu