Guiding Cybersecurity Principles for a Swiftly Changing World

Ravi Sandhu, executive director of the Institute for Cyber Security, had an article published a couple of days ago at Technology News on cyber security. The article begins with an excellent summary: "Two principles need to be part of the consciousness of every cybersecurity practitioner: First, security cannot hold back productivity. Technology that makes us more productive will get deployed and used even if it makes information less secure. Second, cyber and physical space will be increasingly entangled to the point where our activities and their impacts will seamlessly transition from one to the other."

Read the full article here.

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

ICS Startup SafeMashups Forms MashSSL Alliance

The latest Institute for Cyber Security startup to go live, SafeMashups, Inc., has just announced the launch of the MashSSL alliance. Read the press release below:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - November 12, 2009) - A consortium of leading technology companies today announced the creation of the MashSSL Alliance, an organization dedicated to evangelizing the use of the MashSSL technology and specification. MashSSL is an innovative way to use the proven and trusted SSL protocol and trust infrastructure to solve the tricky and serious problem of trust establishment between web applications communicating through an end user at a browser. This is a hard problem as the web applications have to assume that the user in the middle could be a malicious hacker or a legitimate user with a malware infected browser.

The founding members of the Alliance include leading SSL certificate vendors Comodo, DigiCert, Entrust and VeriSign; leading providers of security technology and services Arcot, Cenzic, ChosenSecurity, Denim Group, OneHealthPort, QuoVadis, SafeMashups and Venafi; leading security research institutions Institute for Cyber Security, UTSA, MIT Kerberos Consortium and Secure Business Austria, and noted industry security experts.

"Having been both a vendor and security practitioner, what makes MashSSL such an innovative and elegant solution is the fact that it sits on top of SSL at the application layer and does not disrupt the existing ecosystem -- no new crypto protocols to analyze, no changes to the browser and no new types of credentials," said Lynn Terwoerds, Former Head of Security Architecture & Standards, Barclays GRCB, former Senior Security Strategist, Microsoft, and member of the Cloud Security Alliance. "The ability to significantly reduce the risk involved with online collaboration and transactions opens up a whole new realm of opportunities to both product developers and to security practitioners who need to live in a highly virtualized and cloud based world, where applications and data no longer reside in a single location."

"End users' Web experiences, be it in healthcare or any other vertical, are increasingly an aggregation of data and processing from cooperating Web applications that communicate wholly or partially through the user's browser," said Sue Merk, vice president of business development and product management at OneHealthPort, a coalition of health plans, physicians and hospitals that joined together to build a trusted community where business and clinical information could be shared securely. "Unfortunately, a malicious man-in-the-middle attack or a user infected with man-in-the-browser malware can easily subvert such communications. An open standard to solve this universal problem once, and not in a piece meal ad hoc fashion, has been a long time coming. That it is based on the trusted and familiar SSL certificate infrastructure is a bonus."

MashSSL, which was first developed by application authentication pioneer SafeMashups, has now become an open specification with an open source reference implementation, and is in the process of being standardized.

"Using different proprietary security methods and a multitude of quasi-trusted credentials to solve this fundamental problem is clearly inefficient and will lead to administrative errors which underlie many vulnerabilities," said Siddharth Bajaj, Principal in the Innovation Group at VeriSign and steering committee chair of both the MashSSL Alliance and W3C MashSSL XG. "MashSSL repurposes SSL to create a secure application layer pipe through which open protocols like OAuth, OpenID, OpenAJAX, etc., and proprietary applications like payment provider interfaces can flow in a more secure fashion while leveraging the already existing trust and credential infrastructure."

While MashSSL was originally developed for use with newer mashup technologies, it became rapidly apparent that the protocol can be used in any situation where two Web applications need to communicate through a user's browser, where the user may be malicious or the browser infected with malware. Consequently, the potential field of use for MashSSL is very broad, including potentially underlying identity federation protocols, payment button interfaces, etc.

The initial MashSSL specification and open source reference implementation have been made generally available at www.mashssl.org.

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

Speaking at San Antonio Cyber Vision on December 1

Jeff Reich, our director of research operations, will be representing the Institute for Cyber Security at the  San Antonio Cyber Vision Hi-Tech Mixer. Jeff will share the panel with San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and MGen Richard Webber of the 24th Air Force discussing San Antonio's transformation into a "cyber city". Folks in the San Antonio area who are interested in cyber security should definitely plan to attend the talk that evening.

From the San Antonio Tech News site:

"Please join Technology Connexus Association Board of Directors with Special Guest Speaker, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro to hear about transforming San Antonio into Cyber City USA. We also welcome MGen Richard Webber (Invited), Commander, 24th Air Force and Jeff Reich, Director of Research Operations, UTSA Institute for Cyber Security.

It's the original San Antonio Hi-Tech Mixer featuring fantastic food, great beverages, fabulous door prizes, and the best power networking in San Antonio."

Date: Tuesday, December 1st, 2009, 5:30PM
Location: Chisolm Building, Brass Professional Center 4400 NW Loop 410 San Antonio, TX 78229
Phone: (210) 582-5814

For more details, go to the conference site.

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

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: ICS Advises the Air Force Association on its Cyber Defense Competition

Reuters had an interesting article on the operations division at ICS, covering the Air Force Association's Cyber Defense Competition. In the article, the AFA mentions that competition benefits greatly through the advice and assistance of ICS's Greg White, director of ICS's operations division. Through Greg's efforts, ICS also created and conducts the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

Additionally, The Journal covered the announcement as well, covering how the 125,000-member AFA is geared to promote public understanding of aerospace power and its critical relationship to national security. The article also describes Greg White as a "cyber security expert" and discusses his service as an advisor for the competition.

For more information on ICS and its operations, commercialization, and research divisions, visit the ICS site.

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

ICS in the New York Times

Ravi Sandhu, executive director of the Institute for Cyber Security, and Dwayne Williams, associate director of special projects at ICS, were covered in an article for the New York Times. The article covers the San Antonio involvement in Cyberwarfare, and discusses the Institute and, our "Dark Screen" exercise for different municipalities across the country, and the Air Force 24th Command. An interesting read on San Antonio's involvement with DHS, NIS, ICS, and other acronyms, the full article can be found here.

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

Speaking at InnoTech 2009 on October 29

Jeff Reich, our director of research operations, will be representing the Institute for Cyber Security at the InnoTech 2009 conference, speaking on securing the present and future of cloud computing on Thursday, October 29. Folks in the Austin area who are interested in cloud computing or security (or both!) should plan to attend the talk on Thursday afternoon.

From the InnoTech site: 

"In April of 2009, the Cloud Security Alliance published version 1 of Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing. Version 2 of this guidance is scheduled for release in October of 2009.

In this session, Jeff Reich and Josh Zachry will provide an overview of the updated guidance and identify some of the key security risks being introduced to the enterprise by the rapid adoption of cloud computing, a look ahead to how cloud computing will transform business and the nature of IT."

Date: Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Location: Austin Convention Center, 500 East Cesar Chavez Street Austin, TX 78701

For more details, go to the chapter site.

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

Speaking at UTSA's Cyber Security Awareness Month Event on October 30

Ravi Sandhu, executive director for the Institute for Cyber Security, will be speaking at UTSA as part of its cyber security awareness month event on Friday, October 30. This event is open to the public and all folks in the San Antonio area who are interested in cyber security should make it to the talk.

Below is the release for the talk.

Title: The Future of Cyber Security
Speaker: Ravi Sandhu
Location: University Center Retama Room (UC 2.02.02) UTSA Main Campus
Date/Time: Friday, October 30, 3:00PM to 4:00PM

Bio: Ravi Sandhu is the Founding Executive Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he holds the Lutcher Brown Chair in Cyber Security. Prior to joining UTSA in 2007 he served on the faculty at George Mason University (1989-2007) and Ohio State University (1982-1989). He holds BTech and MTech degress from IIT Bombay and Delhi and MS and PhD degrees from Rutgers University. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE and AAAS, and has received awards from ACM, IEEE, NSA and NIST. His 180+ technical papers have accumulated 10,000+ Google Scholar citations. His research has been funded by NSF, NSA, NIST, DARPA, AFOSR, ONR, AFRL and others. His seminal papers on role-based access control (RBAC) led to RBAC becoming the dominant form of access control in commercial systems. His current projects include his seminal Usage Control model, new models for group-centric information sharing, security in social networking, botnet analysis and defense, high assurance security and the PEI method for secure systems design. He served as founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM TISSEC and Chairman of ACM SIGSAC, and is incoming Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TDSC. He has consulted for numerous industry and government organizations, and has lectured all over the world. He is an inventor on 16 security technology patents. His web site is at www.profsandhu.com.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
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

ICS in the News: Ravi Sandhu Interviewed by CNN

Ravi Sandhu, executive director for the Institute for Cyber Security, was recently interviewed in an article by CNN on cyber security, privacy, and identity theft. From the article:

"Online attackers have information on millions of consumers," said Ravi Sandhu... "Still, even visiting a legitimate Web site has its share of risks, because online attackers may inject malicious content onto them by hacking them or placing advertisements that deliver malware."

For more on ICS's work on identity theft, cyber security and privacy, visit the ICS site.

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