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Ian Welch

Victoria University of Wellington, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty Member

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Papers by Ian Welch

A Survey on Cyber Situation Awareness Systems: Framework, Techniques, and Insights

ACM Computing Surveys

Cyberspace is full of uncertainty in terms of advanced and sophisticated cyber threats which are ... more Cyberspace is full of uncertainty in terms of advanced and sophisticated cyber threats which are equipped with novel approaches to learn the system and propagate themselves, such as AI-powered threats. To debilitate these types of threats, a modern and intelligent Cyber Situation Awareness (SA) system needs to be developed which has the ability of monitoring and capturing various types of threats, analyzing, and devising a plan to avoid further attacks. This paper provides a comprehensive study on the current state-of-the-art in the cyber SA to discuss the following aspects of SA: key design principles, framework, classifications, data collection, analysis of the techniques, and evaluation methods. Lastly, we highlight misconceptions, insights, and limitations of this study and suggest some future work directions to address the limitations.

Dalang -- A Reflective Java Extension

Dalang is a reflective extension for standard Java. It extends the reflective API to include beha... more Dalang is a reflective extension for standard Java. It extends the reflective API to include behavioural reflection as well as introspection. It differs from some other reflective Java implementations in that it requires no change, either to the Java Virtual Machine or the Java system classes. We outline the implementation of Dalang Java, evaluate it, describe our approach to addressing problems with the current implementation and conclude with some open questions that require further research.

Internet NZ study - stage 1 report

Broadband connectivity and the great variety of services offered over the Internet have made it a... more Broadband connectivity and the great variety of services offered over the Internet have made it an important source of information and entertainment and a major means of communication. In 2008, users are more connected than ever. With connectivity to the Internet, however, come security threats. Because the Internet is a global network, an attack can be delivered anonymously from any location in the world. In 2003, a study was published that compared vulnerabilities in web servers from various countries. It showed that web sites in the New Zealand domain were one of the most vulnerable to Google hacking attacks. Vulnerable web servers lead to compromised web servers, which do not only pose a risk to operators of these web servers, but also to their users or customers, because the attackers might insert client-side attacks that trigger upon interaction with such a compromised server. As part of work commissioned by InternetNZ, Victoria University of Wellington has gathered intelligen...

An Android Security Policy Enforcement Tool

International Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications, 2015

The Android operating system (OS) has become the dominant smart phone OS in recent years due to i... more The Android operating system (OS) has become the dominant smart phone OS in recent years due to its accessibility, usability and its open-source philosophy. Consequently, this has also made it a popular target for attackers who aim to install malware on Android devices and take advantage of Android’s coarsegrained, non-revoking permission system. This project designs, implements and evaluates a security tool named COMBdroid, which addresses these security concerns in Android by enforcing fine-grained, user-defined policies. COMBdroid modifies an application before installation, allowing it to override points of security vulnerabilities at run-time. As a proof of concept we have implemented three policies in COMBdroid. This paper documents the development process of COMBdroid, deriving design decisions from the literature review, detailing the design and implementation, and proving the program’s effectiveness through evaluation.

Trustworthy auctions for grid-style economies

Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID'06), 2006

Commercialisation or globalisation of large scale Grids requires the provision of mechanisms to s... more Commercialisation or globalisation of large scale Grids requires the provision of mechanisms to share the wide pool of Grid brokered resources such as computers, software, licences and peripherals amongst many users and organisations. Quickly and efficiently servicing resource requests is critical to the efficiency of such Grid based utility computing and communication providers. The CORA architecture is a market based resource reservation system that utilises a trustworthy Vickrey auction to make combinatorial allocations of resources. The primary advantage of such a scheme is that a trusted auctioneer is no longer necessary, and any system entity can safely host a trustworthy auction. This approach results in more flexibility in the design of large economic systems, with the potential for wide distribution of load amongst many auctioneers. In addition, only the winners of the auction and the prices they pay are revealed while all other bid values are kept secret. This paper also provides performance results for our implementation, that identify the constraints within which a practical trustworthy auction scheme can be implemented in a Grid-style Economy.

The Glasshouse - A Reflective Container for Mobile Code

Event log messages as a human interface, or, "do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction - OZCHI '10, 2010

Computer systems administrators, as a part of their job function, must monitor event logs generat... more Computer systems administrators, as a part of their job function, must monitor event logs generated by their systems for signs of failure, impending failure, or security breaches. Many of these systems produce well-defined output that can be easily filtered for important events. Many others, however, are inordinately complex, a situation increasingly common with the advent of multi-tier systems aimed at Internet commerce. Event logs are very often the only system-level output produced by servers, and thus represent the only common denominator across vendors and solutions. This paper will establish the position that event log messages have shortfalls as an interface for effectively managing such systems, and that a fundamentally different approach is required to improve the situation.

Identifying and Analyzing Web Server Attacks

IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing

Client honeypots can be used to identify malicious web servers that attack web browsers and push ... more Client honeypots can be used to identify malicious web servers that attack web browsers and push malware to client machines. Merely recording network traffic is insufficient to perform comprehensive forensic analyses of such attacks. Custom tools are required to access and analyze network protocol data. Moreover, specialized methods are required to perform a behavioral analysis of an attack, which helps determine exactly what transpired on the attacked system. This paper proposes a record/replay mechanism that enables forensic investigators to extract application data from recorded network streams and allows applications to interact with this data in order to conduct behavioral analyses. Implementations for the HTTP and DNS protocols are presented and their utility in network forensic investigations is demonstrated.

Kava - a powerful and portable reflective Java (poster session)

Addendum to the 2000 proceedings of the conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (Addendum) - OOPSLA '00, 2000

Kava is a powerful and portable reflective Java that uses byte code rewriting to implement behavi... more

Internet Sensor Grid: Experiences with Passive and Active Instruments

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2010

The Internet is constantly evolving with new emergent behaviours arising; some of them malicious.... more The Internet is constantly evolving with new emergent behaviours arising; some of them malicious. This paper discusses opportunities and research direction in an Internet sensor grid for malicious behaviour detection, analysis and countermeasures. We use two example sensors as a basis; firstly the honeyclient for malicious server and content identification (i.e. drive-bydownloads, the most prevalent attack vector for client systems) and secondly the network telescope for Internet Background Radiation detection (IBRwhich is classified as unsolicited, non-productive traffic that traverses the Internet, often malicious in nature or origin). Large amounts of security data can be collected from such sensors for analysis and federating honeyclient and telescope data provides a worldwide picture of attacks that could enable the provision of countermeasures. In this paper we outline some experiences with these sensors and analyzing network telescope data through Grid computing as part of an "intelligence layer" within the Internet.

Security analysis of a protocol for pollution attack detection

38th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2013

Network coding is a technique for maximizing the use of available bandwidth capacity. This is ach... more Network coding is a technique for maximizing the use of available bandwidth capacity. This is achieved by having nodes not just forwarding packets but combining several incoming packets into a single outgoing packet for transmission. Unfortunately, network coding is vulnerable to pollution attacks where a single malicious node can disrupt the operation of the complete network. Several protocols to detect pollution attacks have been proposed in the literature. In this paper we describe a new pollution attack detection protocol that extends the existing SpaceMac protocol. This paper describes how we have modeled the protocol in order to carry out a security analysis and presents the results of that analysis.

Structured Handling of Online Interface Upgrades in Integrating Dependable Systems of Systems

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

The integration of complex systems out of existing systems is an active area of research and deve... more The integration of complex systems out of existing systems is an active area of research and development. There are many practical situations in which the interfaces of the component systems, for example belonging to separate organisations, are changed dynamically and without notification. Usually systems of system (SoS) developers deal with such situations off-line causing considerable downtime and undermining the quality of the service that SoSs are delivering [Romanovsky & Smith 2002]. In this paper we propose an approach to on-line handling such upgrades in a structured and disciplined fashion. All interface changes are viewed as abnormal events and general fault tolerance mechanisms (exception handling, in particular) are applied to dealing with them. The paper outlines general ways of detecting such interface upgrades and recovering after them. An Internet Travel Agency is used as a case study throughout the paper. An implementation demonstrating how the general approach proposed can be applied for dealing with some of the possible interface upgrades within this case study is discussed.

Grid Enabled Internet Instruments

IEEE GLOBECOM 2007-2007 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2007

This paper introduces the Grid Enabled Internet Instrument concept and discusses two instruments ... more This paper introduces the Grid Enabled Internet Instrument concept and discusses two instruments that are being developed at Victoria University to measure Internet quality. The first instrument is a Grid version of the network telescope for studying Internet Background Radiation (IBR) and the second is a hybrid client honeypot system using high and low interaction devices for scanning the web for malicious content and servers. The GEII framework is a work in progress and the initial design is also introduced in this paper as the basis of a new Grid of Internet sensors that can be deployed to improve Internet measurement and gain a global insight to Internet quality.

Restrictions Affecting New Zealanders' Access to the Internet: A Local Study

2014 IEEE 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, 2014

A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for... more

A Protocol for Anonymously Establishing Digital Provenance in Reseller Chains (Short Paper)

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

An increasing number of Internet traders exclusively sell digital products. These digital product... more An increasing number of Internet traders exclusively sell digital products. These digital products can include media files, licenses, services, or subscriptions. We consider the concept of digital provenance in reseller chains. The goal of this work is to provide an honest customer with a guarantee on the origin and ownership history for a digital item even when the reseller they are dealing with is untrusted. We introduce a protocol called the Tagged Transaction protocol which uses a third party called the Tag Generation Centre (TGC) to provide a method for honest customers to check they are purchasing a legitimate item, anonymity for customers and resellers, a method for customers to resell items they have purchased to other customers, and verification of the TGC.

Verifying Digital Provenance in Web Services

2011 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, 2011

Web services often combine or "mashup" a collection of heterogeneous data sources. Service provid... more Web services often combine or "mashup" a collection of heterogeneous data sources. Service providers take data from various sources, including other service providers, and perform some computation or combination of the results and present it to the user. This paper is concerned with the provenance of data provided by web services. Provenance for services includes where the information that is provided by the service originated and who has operated on it. We use a provenance tag that is passed along with the result of the service and contains enough information to recreate a provenance graph. We consider the methods a malicious participant could use to try and fake this provenance information and provide a threat model and security analysis to show our protocol prevents these attacks. We also discuss exclusion attacks where a service provider tries to exclude some input from the provenance information provided.

Identification of malicious web pages through analysis of underlying DNS and web server relationships

2008 33rd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2008

Malicious web pages that launch client-side attacks on web browsers have become an increasing pro... more Malicious web pages that launch client-side attacks on web browsers have become an increasing problem in recent years. High-interaction client honeypots are security devices that can detect these malicious web pages on a network. However, high-interaction client honeypots are both resource-intensive and unable to handle the increasing array of vulnerable clients. This paper presents a novel classification method for detecting malicious web pages that involves inspecting the underlying server relationships. Because of the unique structure of malicious front-end web pages and centralized exploit servers, merely counting the number of domain name extensions and DNS servers used to resolve the host names of all web servers involved in rendering a page is sufficient to determine whether a web page is malicious or benign, independent of the vulnerable web browser targeted by these pages. Combining high-interaction client honeypots and this new classification method into a hybrid system leads to performance improvements.

Re-engineering Security as a Crosscutting Concern

The Computer Journal, 2003

We have re-engineered a third-party application using a reflective security architecture that all... more We have re-engineered a third-party application using a reflective security architecture that allows security to be treated as a crosscutting concern. This has resulted in a considerable reduction in tangling between application code and security code. Prior to the re-engineering, the application was secured using a conventional approach based upon the application of inheritance and the proxy pattern, and we are thus able to compare both approaches. Our experience highlights some general points that are applicable to any attempt to engineer security using advanced separation of concerns technology and some possible improvements to Kava, used to implement the crosscutting concerns.

A protocol for verification of an auction without revealing bid values

Procedia Computer Science, 2010

Auctions have been proposed for allocating computation resources for Cloud computing. However, ma... more Auctions have been proposed for allocating computation resources for Cloud computing. However, many security issues exist with electronic auctions including insider trading, private information revelation, bid filtering, and auctioneers lying about auction results for their own profit. Privacy preserving auction protocols use cryptographic methods to keep losing bid values secret but many have no means of verifying their black box behaviour. This paper presents a protocol that allows participants to verify that an auction has run correctly without revealing bid values of other participants while increasing the robustness of the auction protocol.

Development and Evaluation of a Secure, Privacy Preserving Combinatorial Auction

The use of electronic auctions as a means of trading goods has increased year after year. eBay ha... more The use of electronic auctions as a means of trading goods has increased year after year. eBay has gone from half a million registered users in 1998 to 88 million today. Businesses have also shown interest in using auctions. However, the traditional single good auction as used by eBay lacks the required ability to express dependencies between goods in complex procurement auctions leading to risky bidding strategies and sub optimal allocations. The use of combinatorial auctions, where bidders can place bids on combinations of goods, allows bidders to take advantage of any dependencies and auctioneers to generate optimal allocations of goods. In this paper we introduce a new algorithm for creating a combinatorial auction circuit that can be used to compute the result of a combinatorial auction by any garbled circuit auction protocol. In an electronic auction bids from competing parties are commercially sensitive information as bidders will not want their competitors finding out the value they place on a given item. Therefore, there has been considerable research into auction protocols that protect knowledge of all bids except the winning bid from everyone, including the auctioneer. The Garbled Circuit (GC) protocol as described by Naor, Pinkas and Sumner is an example of such an auction. However, it has only been used to provide privacy for single good auctions rather than combinatorial auctions and has been considered impractical for realistically sized auctions due to the protocol's communication overheads. Using our algorithm for creating combinatorial auction circuits, the GC protocol can conduct combinatorial auction while keeping losing bid values secret. We have also conducted performance measurements on both the computation and communication overhead of the GC protocol using our combinatorial auction circuit. These experiments show that the communication overhead is low enough to allow its use for realistically sized auctions (6MB for an auction with 3 goods, a maximum price of 16, and 100 bidders).

A Survey on Cyber Situation Awareness Systems: Framework, Techniques, and Insights

ACM Computing Surveys

Cyberspace is full of uncertainty in terms of advanced and sophisticated cyber threats which are ... more Cyberspace is full of uncertainty in terms of advanced and sophisticated cyber threats which are equipped with novel approaches to learn the system and propagate themselves, such as AI-powered threats. To debilitate these types of threats, a modern and intelligent Cyber Situation Awareness (SA) system needs to be developed which has the ability of monitoring and capturing various types of threats, analyzing, and devising a plan to avoid further attacks. This paper provides a comprehensive study on the current state-of-the-art in the cyber SA to discuss the following aspects of SA: key design principles, framework, classifications, data collection, analysis of the techniques, and evaluation methods. Lastly, we highlight misconceptions, insights, and limitations of this study and suggest some future work directions to address the limitations.

Dalang -- A Reflective Java Extension

Dalang is a reflective extension for standard Java. It extends the reflective API to include beha... more Dalang is a reflective extension for standard Java. It extends the reflective API to include behavioural reflection as well as introspection. It differs from some other reflective Java implementations in that it requires no change, either to the Java Virtual Machine or the Java system classes. We outline the implementation of Dalang Java, evaluate it, describe our approach to addressing problems with the current implementation and conclude with some open questions that require further research.

Internet NZ study - stage 1 report

Broadband connectivity and the great variety of services offered over the Internet have made it a... more Broadband connectivity and the great variety of services offered over the Internet have made it an important source of information and entertainment and a major means of communication. In 2008, users are more connected than ever. With connectivity to the Internet, however, come security threats. Because the Internet is a global network, an attack can be delivered anonymously from any location in the world. In 2003, a study was published that compared vulnerabilities in web servers from various countries. It showed that web sites in the New Zealand domain were one of the most vulnerable to Google hacking attacks. Vulnerable web servers lead to compromised web servers, which do not only pose a risk to operators of these web servers, but also to their users or customers, because the attackers might insert client-side attacks that trigger upon interaction with such a compromised server. As part of work commissioned by InternetNZ, Victoria University of Wellington has gathered intelligen...

An Android Security Policy Enforcement Tool

International Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications, 2015

The Android operating system (OS) has become the dominant smart phone OS in recent years due to i... more The Android operating system (OS) has become the dominant smart phone OS in recent years due to its accessibility, usability and its open-source philosophy. Consequently, this has also made it a popular target for attackers who aim to install malware on Android devices and take advantage of Android’s coarsegrained, non-revoking permission system. This project designs, implements and evaluates a security tool named COMBdroid, which addresses these security concerns in Android by enforcing fine-grained, user-defined policies. COMBdroid modifies an application before installation, allowing it to override points of security vulnerabilities at run-time. As a proof of concept we have implemented three policies in COMBdroid. This paper documents the development process of COMBdroid, deriving design decisions from the literature review, detailing the design and implementation, and proving the program’s effectiveness through evaluation.

Trustworthy auctions for grid-style economies

Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID'06), 2006

Commercialisation or globalisation of large scale Grids requires the provision of mechanisms to s... more Commercialisation or globalisation of large scale Grids requires the provision of mechanisms to share the wide pool of Grid brokered resources such as computers, software, licences and peripherals amongst many users and organisations. Quickly and efficiently servicing resource requests is critical to the efficiency of such Grid based utility computing and communication providers. The CORA architecture is a market based resource reservation system that utilises a trustworthy Vickrey auction to make combinatorial allocations of resources. The primary advantage of such a scheme is that a trusted auctioneer is no longer necessary, and any system entity can safely host a trustworthy auction. This approach results in more flexibility in the design of large economic systems, with the potential for wide distribution of load amongst many auctioneers. In addition, only the winners of the auction and the prices they pay are revealed while all other bid values are kept secret. This paper also provides performance results for our implementation, that identify the constraints within which a practical trustworthy auction scheme can be implemented in a Grid-style Economy.

The Glasshouse - A Reflective Container for Mobile Code

Event log messages as a human interface, or, "do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction - OZCHI '10, 2010

Computer systems administrators, as a part of their job function, must monitor event logs generat... more Computer systems administrators, as a part of their job function, must monitor event logs generated by their systems for signs of failure, impending failure, or security breaches. Many of these systems produce well-defined output that can be easily filtered for important events. Many others, however, are inordinately complex, a situation increasingly common with the advent of multi-tier systems aimed at Internet commerce. Event logs are very often the only system-level output produced by servers, and thus represent the only common denominator across vendors and solutions. This paper will establish the position that event log messages have shortfalls as an interface for effectively managing such systems, and that a fundamentally different approach is required to improve the situation.

Identifying and Analyzing Web Server Attacks

IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing

Client honeypots can be used to identify malicious web servers that attack web browsers and push ... more Client honeypots can be used to identify malicious web servers that attack web browsers and push malware to client machines. Merely recording network traffic is insufficient to perform comprehensive forensic analyses of such attacks. Custom tools are required to access and analyze network protocol data. Moreover, specialized methods are required to perform a behavioral analysis of an attack, which helps determine exactly what transpired on the attacked system. This paper proposes a record/replay mechanism that enables forensic investigators to extract application data from recorded network streams and allows applications to interact with this data in order to conduct behavioral analyses. Implementations for the HTTP and DNS protocols are presented and their utility in network forensic investigations is demonstrated.

Kava - a powerful and portable reflective Java (poster session)

Addendum to the 2000 proceedings of the conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (Addendum) - OOPSLA '00, 2000

Kava is a powerful and portable reflective Java that uses byte code rewriting to implement behavi... more

Internet Sensor Grid: Experiences with Passive and Active Instruments

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2010

The Internet is constantly evolving with new emergent behaviours arising; some of them malicious.... more The Internet is constantly evolving with new emergent behaviours arising; some of them malicious. This paper discusses opportunities and research direction in an Internet sensor grid for malicious behaviour detection, analysis and countermeasures. We use two example sensors as a basis; firstly the honeyclient for malicious server and content identification (i.e. drive-bydownloads, the most prevalent attack vector for client systems) and secondly the network telescope for Internet Background Radiation detection (IBRwhich is classified as unsolicited, non-productive traffic that traverses the Internet, often malicious in nature or origin). Large amounts of security data can be collected from such sensors for analysis and federating honeyclient and telescope data provides a worldwide picture of attacks that could enable the provision of countermeasures. In this paper we outline some experiences with these sensors and analyzing network telescope data through Grid computing as part of an "intelligence layer" within the Internet.

Security analysis of a protocol for pollution attack detection

38th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2013

Network coding is a technique for maximizing the use of available bandwidth capacity. This is ach... more Network coding is a technique for maximizing the use of available bandwidth capacity. This is achieved by having nodes not just forwarding packets but combining several incoming packets into a single outgoing packet for transmission. Unfortunately, network coding is vulnerable to pollution attacks where a single malicious node can disrupt the operation of the complete network. Several protocols to detect pollution attacks have been proposed in the literature. In this paper we describe a new pollution attack detection protocol that extends the existing SpaceMac protocol. This paper describes how we have modeled the protocol in order to carry out a security analysis and presents the results of that analysis.

Structured Handling of Online Interface Upgrades in Integrating Dependable Systems of Systems

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

The integration of complex systems out of existing systems is an active area of research and deve... more The integration of complex systems out of existing systems is an active area of research and development. There are many practical situations in which the interfaces of the component systems, for example belonging to separate organisations, are changed dynamically and without notification. Usually systems of system (SoS) developers deal with such situations off-line causing considerable downtime and undermining the quality of the service that SoSs are delivering [Romanovsky & Smith 2002]. In this paper we propose an approach to on-line handling such upgrades in a structured and disciplined fashion. All interface changes are viewed as abnormal events and general fault tolerance mechanisms (exception handling, in particular) are applied to dealing with them. The paper outlines general ways of detecting such interface upgrades and recovering after them. An Internet Travel Agency is used as a case study throughout the paper. An implementation demonstrating how the general approach proposed can be applied for dealing with some of the possible interface upgrades within this case study is discussed.

Grid Enabled Internet Instruments

IEEE GLOBECOM 2007-2007 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2007

This paper introduces the Grid Enabled Internet Instrument concept and discusses two instruments ... more This paper introduces the Grid Enabled Internet Instrument concept and discusses two instruments that are being developed at Victoria University to measure Internet quality. The first instrument is a Grid version of the network telescope for studying Internet Background Radiation (IBR) and the second is a hybrid client honeypot system using high and low interaction devices for scanning the web for malicious content and servers. The GEII framework is a work in progress and the initial design is also introduced in this paper as the basis of a new Grid of Internet sensors that can be deployed to improve Internet measurement and gain a global insight to Internet quality.

Restrictions Affecting New Zealanders' Access to the Internet: A Local Study

2014 IEEE 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, 2014

A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for... more

A Protocol for Anonymously Establishing Digital Provenance in Reseller Chains (Short Paper)

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

An increasing number of Internet traders exclusively sell digital products. These digital product... more An increasing number of Internet traders exclusively sell digital products. These digital products can include media files, licenses, services, or subscriptions. We consider the concept of digital provenance in reseller chains. The goal of this work is to provide an honest customer with a guarantee on the origin and ownership history for a digital item even when the reseller they are dealing with is untrusted. We introduce a protocol called the Tagged Transaction protocol which uses a third party called the Tag Generation Centre (TGC) to provide a method for honest customers to check they are purchasing a legitimate item, anonymity for customers and resellers, a method for customers to resell items they have purchased to other customers, and verification of the TGC.

Verifying Digital Provenance in Web Services

2011 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, 2011

Web services often combine or "mashup" a collection of heterogeneous data sources. Service provid... more Web services often combine or "mashup" a collection of heterogeneous data sources. Service providers take data from various sources, including other service providers, and perform some computation or combination of the results and present it to the user. This paper is concerned with the provenance of data provided by web services. Provenance for services includes where the information that is provided by the service originated and who has operated on it. We use a provenance tag that is passed along with the result of the service and contains enough information to recreate a provenance graph. We consider the methods a malicious participant could use to try and fake this provenance information and provide a threat model and security analysis to show our protocol prevents these attacks. We also discuss exclusion attacks where a service provider tries to exclude some input from the provenance information provided.

Identification of malicious web pages through analysis of underlying DNS and web server relationships

2008 33rd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2008

Malicious web pages that launch client-side attacks on web browsers have become an increasing pro... more Malicious web pages that launch client-side attacks on web browsers have become an increasing problem in recent years. High-interaction client honeypots are security devices that can detect these malicious web pages on a network. However, high-interaction client honeypots are both resource-intensive and unable to handle the increasing array of vulnerable clients. This paper presents a novel classification method for detecting malicious web pages that involves inspecting the underlying server relationships. Because of the unique structure of malicious front-end web pages and centralized exploit servers, merely counting the number of domain name extensions and DNS servers used to resolve the host names of all web servers involved in rendering a page is sufficient to determine whether a web page is malicious or benign, independent of the vulnerable web browser targeted by these pages. Combining high-interaction client honeypots and this new classification method into a hybrid system leads to performance improvements.

Re-engineering Security as a Crosscutting Concern

The Computer Journal, 2003

We have re-engineered a third-party application using a reflective security architecture that all... more We have re-engineered a third-party application using a reflective security architecture that allows security to be treated as a crosscutting concern. This has resulted in a considerable reduction in tangling between application code and security code. Prior to the re-engineering, the application was secured using a conventional approach based upon the application of inheritance and the proxy pattern, and we are thus able to compare both approaches. Our experience highlights some general points that are applicable to any attempt to engineer security using advanced separation of concerns technology and some possible improvements to Kava, used to implement the crosscutting concerns.

A protocol for verification of an auction without revealing bid values

Procedia Computer Science, 2010

Auctions have been proposed for allocating computation resources for Cloud computing. However, ma... more Auctions have been proposed for allocating computation resources for Cloud computing. However, many security issues exist with electronic auctions including insider trading, private information revelation, bid filtering, and auctioneers lying about auction results for their own profit. Privacy preserving auction protocols use cryptographic methods to keep losing bid values secret but many have no means of verifying their black box behaviour. This paper presents a protocol that allows participants to verify that an auction has run correctly without revealing bid values of other participants while increasing the robustness of the auction protocol.

Development and Evaluation of a Secure, Privacy Preserving Combinatorial Auction

The use of electronic auctions as a means of trading goods has increased year after year. eBay ha... more The use of electronic auctions as a means of trading goods has increased year after year. eBay has gone from half a million registered users in 1998 to 88 million today. Businesses have also shown interest in using auctions. However, the traditional single good auction as used by eBay lacks the required ability to express dependencies between goods in complex procurement auctions leading to risky bidding strategies and sub optimal allocations. The use of combinatorial auctions, where bidders can place bids on combinations of goods, allows bidders to take advantage of any dependencies and auctioneers to generate optimal allocations of goods. In this paper we introduce a new algorithm for creating a combinatorial auction circuit that can be used to compute the result of a combinatorial auction by any garbled circuit auction protocol. In an electronic auction bids from competing parties are commercially sensitive information as bidders will not want their competitors finding out the value they place on a given item. Therefore, there has been considerable research into auction protocols that protect knowledge of all bids except the winning bid from everyone, including the auctioneer. The Garbled Circuit (GC) protocol as described by Naor, Pinkas and Sumner is an example of such an auction. However, it has only been used to provide privacy for single good auctions rather than combinatorial auctions and has been considered impractical for realistically sized auctions due to the protocol's communication overheads. Using our algorithm for creating combinatorial auction circuits, the GC protocol can conduct combinatorial auction while keeping losing bid values secret. We have also conducted performance measurements on both the computation and communication overhead of the GC protocol using our combinatorial auction circuit. These experiments show that the communication overhead is low enough to allow its use for realistically sized auctions (6MB for an auction with 3 goods, a maximum price of 16, and 100 bidders).