Dynamic Security Modeling in Risk Management Using Environmental Knowledge

Mariagrazia Fugini1, George Hadjichristofi2,,and Mahsa Teimourikia3

1,3Politecnico di Milano, 2Frederick University

1mariagrazia.fugini@polimi.it, 2com.hg@frederick.ac.cy, 3mahsa.teimourikia@polimi.it June 2014

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Motivations

2

[1] K. Smith, Environmental hazards: assessing risk and reducing disaster, Routledge, 2013.[2] R. H. Weber, " Internet of Things–New security and privacy challenges," Computer Law & Security Review, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 23-30, 2010.

• In environmental risk management, providing security for people and various devices dynamically, according what happens in the environment is an open issue [1].

• The characteristics of a highly distributed and resource-constrained systems, make the application of conventional access control models a challenging issue.

• With the emergence of smart environments and Internet of things (IoT), security issues considering both conceptual and physical security should be properly addressed [2].

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Objectives

• To design a security model, which is flexible enough to accommodate varying security rules according to changes in the environment conditions.

• Elements of the security model are described based on the Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC).

• The model aims at dynamically authorize subjects to access diverse data and physical objects employing the adaptive activation and deactivation of security rules and changes in the subject and object attributes.

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A Scenario

• Considering an smart environment (i.e. an airport), in which the objects, people and the environment itself are monitored using sensors, and monitoring devices such as surveillance cameras, check points, wearable devices, and etc.

• The environment includes both open and closed areas in which different sensors and monitoring devices are available.

• The airport Security Staff intervene in case of emergencies, the Security Manager, is the subject in charge in case of an emergency with the highest clearance, and the Surveillance Personnel are in charge of monitoring the environment and can only intervene in minor security problems.

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Security Modeling for Risk Management

• The security model is based on ABAC including the following components:

Subjects: this abstracts a user, an application, or a process wanting to perform an operation on a resource/object. A subject can hold many attributes in these three categories: General Attributes, Geo Attributes, Security Attributes.

Objects: abstract resources that a subject can access or act on. Objects hold three groups of attributes: General Attributes, Geo Attributes, Security Attributes.

Environment: this component models the environment (i.e., the airport) with its dynamic conditions, which affect the security decisions.

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Security Modeling for Risk Management

Actions and Activities: these are operations that can be executed by subjects on objects in a given context including Simple operations (actions)(e.g. read, write, etc.) and complex operations, called activities, which combine simple actions to model a task, a processor or a physical action. (e.g. “Redirect the airplane to another runway”).

Contexts: this component indicates a set of security rules, which are valid in a certain situation based on dynamic changes in the environment, including occurrence of risks.

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Security Modeling for Risk Management

Risk and Emergency: The monitored environment conditions, which change dynamically, can cause the occurrence of some risks/emergencies. A risky situation is recognized based on parameters such as: type, level, and location determining how to adapt security rules to handle it.

Events: Changes in the environment monitored conditions, trigger events that in turn activate/deactivate contexts that modify the security rules. Or cause changes in the subject/object attributes.

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Security Modeling for Risk Management

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Adaptivity

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Adaptivity

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Adaptivity

ECA (Event-Condition-Action):

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The Adaptive Security Model

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Conclusions

• Here we introduced design principles for dynamic security modeling considering the environment risks.

• We make extensions on ABAC paradigm to make the security model adaptive to handle risk situations.

• To facilitate this adaptivity we employed the concept of contexts to dynamically change the security rules

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Future Works

• As future work, we intend to focus on the topics of:

• binding environmental and spatial information,

• on the dynamics of assigning authoritative roles to administrators,

• and on ways to handle conflicting Context switching.

• We are working towards inclusion of this security model in the Risk Management Tool simulator developed for risk management and described in [3], based on Matlab and on a web application deployment environment.

[3] M. Fugini, C. Raibulet and L. Ubezio, "Risk assessment in work environments: modeling and simulation.," Concurrency and computation: Practice and experience, vol. 24, no. 18,pp. 2381-2403, 2012.

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Thank You