FP7: Critical Infrastructure Protection: Difference between revisions

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== Project Proposals ==
ideas we have:
* [[RedZone]]
⚫
* [[Mapping Critical IT Infrastructures]]
* [[PROMIS]]
* [[Reliability Evaluation of Free / Open Source / Libre Software]]


== Call ==
==Recovery Oriented Computing, Virtualization, and Secutity==


* [[CallDetails-ICT-SEC-2007.1.7]]: Call details
Assume that attacks and breaches are unavoidable; focus on how to
make systems resilient in spite of them. For instance, extend Recovery
Oriented Computing (ROC) ideas to apply to the security infrastructure. What
if instead of a company or country running services on servers, having
them run on virtual machines (cf. what Amazon offers with its EC2
service) that run on farms and can be brought up and down at will? If
something is attacked, we just bring it down and spawn another
pre-configured virtual machine hosting exactly the same services... In
sort, combine virtualisation and ROC for security infrastructure.


== Partners ==
Recent moves in security infrastructure could already be interpreted under this light.
DNS root servers have started adopting anycast, in which case traffic from a compromised
server will automatically switch to a standby server via BGP.


* [[ICT-SEC-2007.1.7 Partners Table]]
Coming back to virtualisation, imagine we have an infrastructure that can host
fully configured services; e.g., an image of a DNS server, or e-mail server, etc.
The server itself runs as an instance of that image. When the image is attacked or
compromised, you just bring up another image. This requires:

* A substrate on which the virtual machines will run
* A way to configure virtual machines and package them, so as to be ready for deployment
* A way to interact with the substrate and the virtual machines in order to control their operation

===Cons===

The marriage of virtualisation and security is not exactly new, see [http://www.virtualization.info/2006/07/security-by-virtualization.html].

⚫
==Mapping Critical IT Infrastructures==

Develop a way to map critical IT infrastructures. The
dependencies are very complex, and therefore you need tools and data
to explore what is really critical. Is Vodafone part of Greece's
critical infrastructure? Linux? Solaris? MS-DOS? Postgres? So we do a
kind of service and artefact dependency analysis, mapping dependencies
and criticality indicators/measures not only software but telecom
links, hardware facilities, etc. We develop the software and then run
a pilot study.

How do we measure criticality? I can come up with two dimensions:

# The amount of infrastructure affected. If we map the infrastructure on a graph, it is clear that some nodes are more central than others. This has been explored at length in scale-free networks research, providing grounding why the internet is vulnerable to targeted attacks.
# The exact effects on the affected infrastructure. A slight performance degradation is not the same as a crash.

In software, it has long since been observed that not all bugs are worth fixing, as they
may never produce a failure. This observations may extend to whole security infrastructures,
and perhaps this is what we are aiming at here?

===Cons===

How is this different from automatic vulnerability analysis?

==Web Applications Security==
'''(iii)''' Web applications security is constantly gaining the interest of research community, as the existence of web applications is getting ubiquitous, and new threats to the critical infrastructure are introduced. Ajax security, XSS, CSRF, to name a few, even traditional security people fail to understand and protect against these, or new attack vectors created by the complex nature of web applications. What I see missing is a well defined framework and/or the static analysis tools required to test applications and find vulnerabilities. Discovering and fixing such vulnerabilities is a great move towards more secure infrastructure. (mgogoulos)

''Are you talking about some kind of Web 2.0 Security Infrastructure here?''
Not necessarily, web application security issues affects all web services, but since Web 2.0 technologies are more complicated our work can be valuable to either traditional Web or Web 2.

===Cons===

There is an interest lately in related matters, e.g., AJAX security, see [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529314/]. How do we differentiate from that?

Latest revision as of 06:41, 12 October 2007

Project Proposals

Call

Partners

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