ACM Transactions on Information and System Security 

About: ACM Transactions on Information and System Security is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Access control & Role-based access control. It has an ISSN identifier of 1094-9224. Over the lifetime, 319 publications have been published receiving 48765 citations.

Proposed NIST standard for role-based access control

Abstract: In this article we propose a standard for role-based access control (RBAC). Although RBAC models have received broad support as a generalized approach to access control, and are well recognized for their many advantages in performing large-scale authorization management, no single authoritative definition of RBAC exists today. This lack of a widely accepted model results in uncertainty and confusion about RBAC's utility and meaning. The standard proposed here seeks to resolve this situation by unifying ideas from a base of frequently referenced RBAC models, commercial products, and research prototypes. It is intended to serve as a foundation for product development, evaluation, and procurement specification. Although RBAC continues to evolve as users, researchers, and vendors gain experience with its application, we feel the features and components proposed in this standard represent a fundamental and stable set of mechanisms that may be enhanced by developers in further meeting the needs of their customers. As such, this document does not attempt to standardize RBAC features beyond those that have achieved acceptance in the commercial marketplace and research community, but instead focuses on defining a fundamental and stable set of RBAC components. This standard is organized into the RBAC Reference Model and the RBAC System and Administrative Functional Specification. The reference model defines the scope of features that comprise the standard and provides a consistent vocabulary in support of the specification. The RBAC System and Administrative Functional Specification defines functional requirements for administrative operations and queries for the creation, maintenance, and review of RBAC sets and relations, as well as for specifying system level functionality in support of session attribute management and an access control decision process.

False data injection attacks against state estimation in electric power grids

Abstract: A power grid is a complex system connecting electric power generators to consumers through power transmission and distribution networks across a large geographical area. System monitoring is necessary to ensure the reliable operation of power grids, and state estimation is used in system monitoring to best estimate the power grid state through analysis of meter measurements and power system models. Various techniques have been developed to detect and identify bad measurements, including interacting bad measurements introduced by arbitrary, nonrandom causes. At first glance, it seems that these techniques can also defeat malicious measurements injected by attackers.In this article, we expose an unknown vulnerability of existing bad measurement detection algorithms by presenting and analyzing a new class of attacks, called false data injection attacks, against state estimation in electric power grids. Under the assumption that the attacker can access the current power system configuration information and manipulate the measurements of meters at physically protected locations such as substations, such attacks can introduce arbitrary errors into certain state variables without being detected by existing algorithms. Moreover, we look at two scenarios, where the attacker is either constrained to specific meters or limited in the resources required to compromise meters. We show that the attacker can systematically and efficiently construct attack vectors in both scenarios to change the results of state estimation in arbitrary ways. We also extend these attacks to generalized false data injection attacks, which can further increase the impact by exploiting measurement errors typically tolerated in state estimation. We demonstrate the success of these attacks through simulation using IEEE test systems, and also discuss the practicality of these attacks and the real-world constraints that limit their effectiveness.

Crowds: anonymity for Web transactions

Abstract: In this paper we introduce a system called Crowds for protecting users' anonymity on the world-wide-web. Crowds, named for the notion of “blending into a crowd,” operates by grouping users into a large and geographically diverse group (crowd) that collectively issues requests on behalf of its members. Web servers are unable to learn the true source of a request because it is equally likely to have originated from any member of the crowd, and even collaborating crowd members cannot distinguish the originator of a request from a member who is merely forwarding the request on behalf of another. We describe the design, implementation, security, performance, and scalability of our system. Our security analysis introduces degrees of anonymity as an important tool for describing and proving anonymity properties.

Improved proxy re-encryption schemes with applications to secure distributed storage

Abstract: In 1998, Blaze, Bleumer, and Strauss (BBS) proposed an application called atomic proxy re-encryption, in which a semitrusted proxy converts a ciphertext for Alice into a ciphertext for Bob without seeing the underlying plaintext. We predict that fast and secure re-encryption will become increasingly popular as a method for managing encrypted file systems. Although efficiently computable, the wide-spread adoption of BBS re-encryption has been hindered by considerable security risks. Following recent work of Dodis and Ivan, we present new re-encryption schemes that realize a stronger notion of security and demonstrate the usefulness of proxy re-encryption as a method of adding access control to a secure file system. Performance measurements of our experimental file system demonstrate that proxy re-encryption can work effectively in practice.

Testing Intrusion detection systems: a critique of the 1998 and 1999 DARPA intrusion detection system evaluations as performed by Lincoln Laboratory

Abstract: In 1998 and again in 1999, the Lincoln Laboratory of MIT conducted a comparative evaluation of intrusion detection systems (IDSs) developed under DARPA funding. While this evaluation represents a significant and monumental undertaking, there are a number of issues associated with its design and execution that remain unsettled. Some methodologies used in the evaluation are questionable and may have biased its results. One problem is that the evaluators have published relatively little concerning some of the more critical aspects of their work, such as validation of their test data. The appropriateness of the evaluation techniques used needs further investigation. The purpose of this article is to attempt to identify the shortcomings of the Lincoln Lab effort in the hope that future efforts of this kind will be placed on a sounder footing. Some of the problems that the article points out might well be resolved if the evaluators were to publish a detailed description of their procedures and the rationale that led to their adoption, but other problems would clearly remain./par>