The Internet of Things (IoT) is here: smart objects are\ud
pervading our everyday life. Smart devices automatically collect and\ud
exchange data of various kinds, directly gathered from sensors or generated\ud
by aggregations. Suitable coordination primitives and analysis\ud
mechanisms are in order to design and reason about IoT systems, and\ud
to intercept the implied technology shifts. We address these issues by\ud
defining IoT-LySa, a process calculus endowed with a static analysis\ud
that tracks the provenance and the route of IoT data, and detects how\ud
they affect the behaviour of smart objects
Configuring and maintaining a firewall configuration is notoriously hard. Policies are written in low-level, platform-specific languages where firewall rules are inspected and enforced along non trivial control flow paths. Further difficulties arise from Network Address Translation (NAT), since filters must be implemented with addresses translations in mind. In this work, we study the problem of decompiling a real firewall configuration into an abstract specification. This abstract version throws the low-level details away by exposing the meaning of the configuration, i.e., the allowed connections with possible address translations. The generated specification makes it easier for system administrators to check if: (i) the intended security policy is actually implemented;(ii) two configurations are equivalent; (iii) updates have the desired effect on the firewall behavior. The peculiarity of our approach is that is independent of the specific target firewall system and language. This independence is obtained through a generic intermediate language that provides the typical features of real configuration languages and that separates the specification of the rulesets, determining the destiny of packets, from the specification of the platform-dependent steps needed to elaborate packets. We present a tool that decompiles real firewall configurations from different systems into this intermediate language and uses the Z3 solver to synthesize the abstract specification that succinctly represents the firewall behavior and the NAT. Tests on real configurations show that the tool is effective: it synthesizes complex policies in a matter of minutes and, and it answers to specific queries in just a few seconds. The tool can also point out policy differences before and after configuration updates in a simple, tabular form.
More smart objects and more applications on the Internet of Things (IoT) mean more security challenges. In IoT security is crucial but difficult to obtain. On the one hand the usual trade-off between highly secure and usable systems is more impelling than ever; on the other hand security is considered a feature that has a cost often unaffordable. Therefore, IoT designers not only need tools to assess possible risks and to study countermeasures, but also methodologies to estimate their costs. Here, we present a methodology, based on the process calculus IoT-LySa, to infer quantitative measures on evolution of systems. The derived quantitative evaluation is exploited to establish the cost of the possible security countermeasures, in terms of time and energy.
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