John Lyle

Here's Johnny: A Methodology for Developing Attacker Personas

The adversarial element is an intrinsic part of the design of secure systems, but our assumptions about attackers and threat is often limited or stereotypical. Although there has been previous work on applying User-Centered Design on Persona development to build personas for possible attackers, such work is only speculative and fails to build upon recent research. This paper presents an approach for developing Attacker Personas which is both grounded and validated by structured data about attackers. We describe a case study example where the personas were developed and used to support the development of a Context of Use description for the EU FP7 webinos project.

The webinos project

This poster paper describes the webinos project and presents the architecture and security features developed in webinos. It highlights the main objectives and concepts of the project and describes the architecture derived to achive the objectives.

Cross-Platform Access Control for Mobile Web Applications

Web browsers are a common platform for delivering cross-platform applications. However, they currently fail to provide consistent access control for security and privacy sensitive JavaScript APIs, such as geolocation and local storage. This problem is exacerbated by new HTML5 APIs and the increasing number of personal devices people own and use. In this paper we present the webinos platform which aims to provide a single, cross-device policy system for web applications on a wide range of web-enabled devices including TVs, smartphones, in-car systems and PCs. webinos solves the existing deficiencies in web authorisation by introducing the concept of a personal zone, the set of all devices and services owned by a particular user. All devices in this zone can synchronize their access control policies through interoperable middleware and can create flexible rules which may refer to an individual user, device or the entire zone. We provide details of the architecture and explain how our experience during design highlighted several conceptual challenges.

On the Feasibility of Remote Attestation for Web Services

Remote attestation is a significant part of the functionality offered by trusted computing, allowing a platform to demonstrate that it is running trustworthy software. However, this technique has been criticised as impractical, citing the management overhead of maintaining lists of acceptable software configurations. In this paper we put numbers to this problem, and argue that remote attestation may not be too fragile a technology to be used for web services.

Trustable Remote Verification of Web Services

Service Oriented Architectures currently provide little or no evidence that each remote component has been implemented correctly. This is a problem for businesses hoping to exploit the potential benefits of SOA. We present a technique called Trustable Remote Verification, which lets providers create behavioural guarantees of their web services. Our approach is flexible, using Extended Static Checking for verification and has the significant advantage of requiring no additional trusted third party.

Guidelines for integrating personas into software engineering tools

Personas have attracted the interest of many in the usability and software engineering communities. To date, however, there has been little work illustrating how personas can be integrated into software tools to support these engineering activities. This paper presents four guidelines that software engineering tools should incorporate to support the design and evolution of personas. These guidelines are grounded in our experiences modifying the open-source CAIRIS Requirements Management tool to support design and development activities for the EU FP7 webinos project.

Extending the web to support personal network services

Web browsers are able to access resources hosted anywhere in the world, yet content and features on personal devices remain largely inaccessible. Because of routing, addressing and security issues, web applications are unable to use local sensors, cameras and nearby network devices without resorting to proprietary extensions. Several projects have attempted to overcome these limitations yet none provide a full solution which embraces existing web concepts and scales across multiple devices. This paper describes an improved approach based on a combination of Web Intents for discovery, a custom local naming system and routing provided by the webinos framework. We show that it can be applied to existing services and that improves upon the state of the art in privacy, consistency and flexibility.

Requirements sensemaking using concept maps

Requirements play an important role in software engineering, but their perceived usefulness means that they often fail to be properly maintained. Traceability is often considered a means for motivating and maintaining requirements, but this is difficult without a better understanding of the requirements themselves. Sensemaking techniques help us get this understanding, but the representations necessary to support it are difficult to create, and scale poorly when dealing with medium to large scale problems. This paper describes how, with the aid of supporting software tools, concept mapping can be used to both make sense of and improve the quality of a requirements specification. We illustrate this approach by using it to update the requirements specification for the EU webinos project, and discuss several findings arising from our results.

On the design and development of webinos : a distributed mobile application middleware

As personal devices become smarter, opportunities arise for sharing services, applications and data between them. While web technologies hold the promise of being a unifying layer, browsers lack functionality for supporting inter-device communication, synchronization, and security. To address this, we designed webinos: a cross-device distributed middleware providing interoperability, compatibility and security for mobile web applications. In this paper we present a case study of the webinos project, showing how the architecture of webinos was specified, designed and implemented, and reflect on several lessons learned.

Trustworthy Log Reconciliation for Distributed Virtual Organisations

Secure management of logs in an organisational grid environment is often considered a task of low priority. However, it must be rapidly upgraded when the logs have security properties in their own right. We present several use cases where log integrity and confidentiality are essential, and propose a log reconciliation architecture in which both are ensured. We use a combination of trusted computing and virtualization to enable blind log analysis , allowing users to see the results of legitimate queries, while still withholding access to privileged raw data.