Aspect-oriented Security Engineering - Amthor, Peter

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Résumé :
Engineering secure systems is an error-prone process, where any decision margin potentially favors critical implementation faults. To this end, formal security models serve as an abstract basis for verifying security properties. Unfortunately, the potential for human error in engineering and analyzing such models is still considerable. This work seeks to mitigate this problem. We identified semantic gaps between security requirements, informal security policies, and security models as a major source of error. Our goal is then based on this observation: to support error-minimizing design decisions by bridging such gaps. Due to the broad range of security-critical application domains, no single modeling framework may achieve this. We therefore adopt the idea of aspect-oriented software development to tailor the formal part of a security engineering process towards security requirements of the system. Our method, termed aspect-oriented security engineering, is based on the idea of keeping each step in this process well-defined, small, and monotonic in terms of the degree of formalism. Our practical results focus on two use cases: first, model engineering for operating systems and middleware security policies; second, model analysis of runtime properties related to potential privilege escalation. We eventually combine both use cases to present a model-based reengineering approach for the access control system of Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux).

Biographie:
Peter Amthor ist promovierter Informatiker, er forscht und lehrt am Fachgebiet Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme der Technischen Universit?t Ilmenau. Seine wissenschaftlichen Ver?ffentlichungen auf dem Gebiet sicherer IT-Systeme verfolgen das Ziel, formale Methoden f?r deren Entwurf, Analyse, Spezifikation und Implementierung einem breiten Spektrum von Anwendungen zug?nglicher zu machen. Er unterrichtet Kurse in Betriebssystemen, verteilten Systemen, Systemsicherheit und modellbasiertem Security Engineering. Peter Amthor holds a PhD in Computer Science. He works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Distributed Systems and Operating Systems group at Ilmenau University of Technology (Technische Universit?t Ilmenau), Germany. His publication work focuses on formal foundations of secure IT systems, with the aim of making formal methods for their design, analysis, specification, and implementation more accessible to a broad range of applications. He teaches courses in operating systems, distributed systems, systems security and model-based security engineering.