Brane Calculi Systems: A Static Preview of their Possible Behaviour

We improve the precision of a previous Control Flow Analysis for Brane Calculi, by adding information on the context and introducing causality information on the membranes. This allows us to prove some biological properties on the behaviour of systems specified in Brane Calculi.Comment: Presented at MeCBIC 201

Statically detecting message confusions in a multi-protocol setting

In a multi-protocol setting, different protocols are concurrently executed, and each principal can participate in more than one. The possibilities of attacks therefore increase, often due to the presence of similar patterns in messages. Messages coming from one protocol can be confused with similar messages coming from another protocol. As a consequence, data of one type may be interpreted as data of another, and it is also possible that the type is the expected one, but the message is addressed to another protocol. In this paper, we shall present an extension of the LySa calculus [7, 4] that decorates encryption with tags including the protocol identifier, the protocol step identifier and the intended types of the encrypted terms. The additional information allows us to find the messages that can be confused and therefore to have hints to reconstruct the attack. We extend accordingly the standard static Control Flow Analysis for LySa, which over-approximates all the possible behaviour of the studied protocols, included the possible message confusions that may occur at run-time. Our analysis has been implemented and successfully applied to small sets of protocols. In particular, we discovered an undocumented family of attacks, that may arise when Bauer-Berson-Feiertag and the Woo-Lam authentication protocols are running in parallel. The implementation complexity of the analysis is low polynomial

Predicting global usages of resources endowed with local policies

The effective usages of computational resources are a primary concern of up-to-date distributed applications. In this paper, we present a methodology to reason about resource usages (acquisition, release, revision, ...), and therefore the proposed approach enables to predict bad usages of resources. Keeping in mind the interplay between local and global information occurring in the application-resource interactions, we model resources as entities with local policies and global properties governing the overall interactions. Formally, our model takes the shape of an extension of pi-calculus with primitives to manage resources. We develop a Control Flow Analysis computing a static approximation of process behaviour and therefore of the resource usages.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2011, arXiv:1107.584

The cost of securing IoT communications

More smart objects and more applications on the Internet of Things (IoT) mean more security challenges. In IoT security is crucial but difficult to obtain. On the one hand the usual trade-off between highly secure and usable systems is more impelling than ever; on the other hand security is considered a feature that has a cost often unaffordable. To relieve this kind of problems, IoT designers not only need tools to assess possible risks and to study countermeasures, but also methodologies to estimate their costs. Here, we present a preliminary methodology, based on the process calculus IoT-LySa, to infer quantitative measures on systems evolution. The derived quantitative evaluation is exploited to establish the cost of the possible security countermeasures

Safer in the Clouds (Extended Abstract)

We outline the design of a framework for modelling cloud computing systems.The approach is based on a declarative programming model which takes the form of a lambda-calculus enriched with suitable mechanisms to express and enforce application-level security policies governing usages of resources available in the clouds. We will focus on the server side of cloud systems, by adopting a pro-active approach, where explicit security policies regulate server's behaviour.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2010, arXiv:1010.530

Securing IoT communications: at what cost?

IoT systems use wireless links for local communication, where locality depends on the transmission range and include many devices with low computational power such as sensors. In IoT systems, security is a crucial requirement, but difficult to obtain, because standard cryptographic techniques have a cost that is usually unaffordable. We resort to an extended version of the process calculus LySa, called IoTLySa, to model the patterns of communication of IoT devices. Moreover, we assign rates to each transition to infer quantitative measures on the specified systems. The derived performance evaluation can be exploited to establish the cost of the possible security countermeasures

Tracking sensitive and untrustworthy data in IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) produces and processes large amounts of data. Among these data, some must be protected and others must be carefully handled because they come from untrusted sources. Taint analysis techniques can be used to for marking data and for monitoring their propagation at run time, so to determine how they influence the rest of the computation. Starting from the specification language IoT-LySa, we propose a Control Flow Analysis for statically predicting how tainted data spread across an IoT system and for checking whether those computations considered security critical are not affected by tainted data

Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy for Advanced Neuroendocrine Tumors

No abstract availabl