The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

Reports and Papers Archive


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Guideline on Integrity Assurance and Control in Database Administration

U.S. Department of Commerce

The Guideline provides explicit direction to Federal database administration and database security personnel on how to improve database control.  The document identifies integrity and security problems in the administration of database technology, and discusses those procedures and methods which have proven effective in addressing these problems.  The document also provides an explicit, step-by-step procedure for examining and verifying the accuracy and completeness of a database.

Added 2002-07-26

Security Relevancy Analysis On The Registry Of Windows NT 4.0

CERIAS TR 1999-04
Wenliang Du, Praerit Garg, Aditya P. Mathur
Download: PDF
Added 2002-07-26

Testing for Software Vulnerability Using Environment Perturbation

CERIAS TR 1999-05
Wenliang Du, Aditya P. Mathur
Download: PDF
Added 2002-07-26

Protocols for Secure Remote Database Access

Wenliang Du
Added 2002-07-26

Multi-Commodity Private Bidding and Auctions

Mikhail J. Atallah and Wenliang Du
Added 2002-07-26


Towards a Calculus of Secure Mobile Computations

Jan Vitek and Giuseppe Castagna

The SEAL calculus is a calculus of mobile computations
designed for programming secure distributed
applications over large scale open networks. The
calculus is a distributed variant of the pi-calculus
that incorporates agent mobility as well as strong
protection mechanisms. Linear, revocable, capabilities
control access to resources and ensure that agents may
only use resources that have been allocated to them.
Capabilities are also used to protect agents from the
hosts on which they execute. The syntax and semantics
of the SEAL calculus are presented and its expressive
power is demonstrated with an example secure mobile

Added 2002-07-26

Flexible Alias Protection

James Noble and John Potter and Jan Vitek

Aliasing is endemic in object oriented programming.
Because an object can be modified via any alias, object
oriented programs are hard to understand, maintain, and
analyse. Flexalias is a conceptual model of
inter-object relationships which limits the visibility
of changes via aliases, allowing objects to be aliased
but mitigating the undesirable effects of aliasing.
Flexalias can be checked statically using programmer
supplied {\”}aliasing modes{\”} and imposes no run-time
overhead. Using flexalias, programs can incorporate
mutable objects, immutable values, and updatable
collections of shared objects, in a natural object
oriented programming style, while avoiding the problems
caused by aliasing.

Added 2002-07-26

{A Coordination Model for Agents Based on Secure Spaces}

C. Bryce and M. Oriol and J. Vitek
Added 2002-07-26

Mobile Agents and Hostile Hosts

Jan Vitek and Giuseppe Castagna
Added 2002-07-26

Confined Types

CERIAS TR 2001-63
Boris Bokowski and Jan Vitek
Download: PDF

The sharing and transfer of references in object-oriented languages is difficult to control.  Without any constraint, practical experience has shown that even carefully engineered object-oriented code can be brittle, and subtle security deficiencies can go unnoticed.  In this paper, we present inexpensive syntactic constraints that strengthen encapsulation by imposing static restrictions on the spread of references.  In particular, we introduce confined types to impose a static scoping discipline on dynamic references and anonymous methods to loosen confinement somewhat to allow code reuse.  We have implemented a verifier which performs a modular analysis of Java programs and provides a static guarantee that confinement is respected.

Added 2002-07-26

Secure Composition of Insecure Components

Peter Sewell and Jan Vitek
Added 2002-07-26

The JavaSeal Mobile Agent Kernel

CERIAS TR 2001-64
Jan Vitek and Ciaran Bryce
Download: PDF

Mobile agents show promise as a new distributed programming paradigm in which locality plays a central role - programs that are able to move closer to their data can overcome limitations of connectivity, latency or bandwidth.  Mobility also enables distributed systems to evolve; for instance, the deployment of a new service over a network can be programmed as part of the service itself.  Of course, moving programs introduces new challenges.  One of these is related to program structure: How much of a computation should be moved?  Where are the boundaries between mobile and immobile entities drawn?  A second challenge is to provide security guarantees: How can the actions of mobile agent be controlled?  And what kinds of securty properties can we realistically expect to enforce?  We answer these questions within the framework of the JavaSeal mobile agent system kernel.  JavaSeal provides several abstractions for constructuring agent systems in Java.  Our basic building block is the seal which is a nested encapsulated computation fragment with sharply delineated boundaries.  Strands are sequential threads of computation bound to a seal.  Capules transfer passive seals and objects over communication channels; Traffic over channels is regulated by portals.  We argue that these abstractions are sufficient to program secure mobile agent systems.  An electronic commerce application built over our kernel is used as a demonstrator.

Added 2002-07-26

Security and Communication in Mobile Object Systems

Jan Vitek and Manuel Serrano and Dimitris Thanos

In this paper we discuss security in mobile object
systems. Mobile object systems embody a paradigm where
computation may move across the network and carry out
distributed activities. This parasigm has been
popularized by the JAVA programming language and the
work on mobile software agent. We study security
problems of interaction mobile object systems taking
Java as an example, identify weaknesses and propose
solutions.

Added 2002-07-26