The security goals of an organization are realized through security policies, which concern physical security, digital security and security awareness. An insider is aware of these security policies, and might be able to thwart the security goals by combining physical, digital and social means. A systematic analysis of such attacks requires the whole environment where the insider operates to be formally represented. This paper presents Portunes, a framework which integrates all three security domains in a single environment. Portunes consists of a high-level abstraction model focusing on the relations between the three security domains and a lower abstraction level language able to represent the model and describe attacks which span the three security domains. Using the Portunes framework, we are able to represent a whole new family of attacks where the insider is not assumed to use purely digital actions to achieve a malicious goal.

Penetration tests on IT systems are sometimes coupled with physical penetration tests and social engineering. In physical penetration tests where social engineering is allowed, the penetration tester directly interacts with the employees. These interactions are usually based on deception and if not done properly can upset the employees, violate their privacy or damage their trust toward the organization and might lead to law suits and loss of productivity. We propose two methodologies for performing a physical penetration test where the goal is to gain an asset using social engineering. These methodologies aim to reduce the impact of the penetration test on the employees. The methodologies have been validated by a set of penetration tests performed over a period of two years.

Security policy alignment concerns the matching of security policies specified at different levels in socio-technical systems, and delegated to different agents, technical and human. For example, the policy that sales data should not leave an organization is refined into policies on door locks, firewalls and employee behavior, and this refinement should be correct with respect to the original policy. Although alignment of security policies in socio-technical systems has been discussed in the literature, especially in relation to business goals, there has been no formal treatment of this topic so far in terms of consistency and completeness of policies. Wherever formal approaches are used in policy alignment, these are applied to well-defined technical access control scenarios instead. Therefore, we aim at formalizing security policy alignment for complex socio-technical systems in this paper, and our formalization is based on predicates over sequences of actions. We discuss how this formalization provides the foundations for existing and future methods for finding security weaknesses induced by misalignment of policies in sociotechnical systems.

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