Onion Routing provides anonymous connections that are strongly resistant to both eavesdropping and traffic analysis.  Unmodified Internet applications can use these anonymous connections by means of proxies…

Protection of software code against illegitimate modifications by its users is a pressing issue to many software developers. Many software-based mechanisms for protecting program code are too weak (e.g., they have single points of failure) or too expensive to apply (e.g., they in-  cur heavy runtime performance penalty to the protected programs). In this paper, we present and explore a methodology that we believe can protect program integrity in a more tamper-resilient and manner. Our approach is based on a distributed scheme, in which protection and tamper-resistance of program code is achieved, not by a single security module, but by a network of (smaller) security units that work together in the program. These security units, or guards, can be programmed to do certain tasks (checksumming the program code is one example) and a network of them can reinforce the protection of each other by creating mutual-protection. We have implemented a system for automating the process of installing guards into Win32 executables. 1 Experimental results show that memory space and run-time performance impacts incurred by guards can be kept very low (as explained later in the paper).

This work introduces a new approach to code safety.  We present Naccio, a system architecture that allows a large class of safety policies to be expressed in a general and platform-independent way…

This paper describes a specfication-based approach to detect exploitations of vulnerabilities in security-critical programs.  The approach utilizes security specifications that describe the intended behavior of programs and scans audit trails for operations that are in violation of the specifications…

Intrusion detection systems rely on a wide variety of observable data to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate activities.  In this paper we study one such observable - sequences of system calls into the kernel of an operating system…

An attractive target for a computer system attacker is the router.  An attacker in control of a router can disrupt communication by dropping or misrouting packets passing through the router.  We present a protocol called Watchers that detects and reacts to routers that drop or misroute packets…

We\‘re looking into the fundamental problem of watermarking finite numeric sets. The wide area of applicability of the problem ranging from numeric database content to stock market analysis data, makes it especially intriguing when considering a generic solution and particularities of its various applications. Given a range of associated numeric constraints and assumptions we provide a generic solution and analyze associated attacks. We further present several problem applicability domains and relate it to some of our past and ongoing research in watermarking semistructures.

We present a Hierarchical Hybrid Network architecture for wireless networks.  In such a network, mobile nodes are hierarchically organized into groups.  Different groups can have different routing protocols.  Mobile nodes communicate with nodes outside their groups through the group agents.  The groups are highly autonomous.  This architecture is flexible and scalable.  We conduct experiments to compare the new architecture with Ad Hoc networks.  The new architecture has a more stable topology and higher throughput when the number of mobile nodes is large.  The objective of our research is to set up a survivable, secure mobile wireless network.

The development of inter-networked enterprises created a new computing environment in which information assurance is critical. The objective of this article is to investigate the information assurance needs of today

The design and operation of autonomous agents to assure information in ERP systems of inter-networked enterprises are investigated. A variable information assurance implementation model is proposed based on the AIMIS model, and a risk assessment procedure is applied. The protocols and models needed to support variable assurance are introduced and their performance is assessed. Experimentation shows the possibility to reduce the processing time of requests without decreasing the proportion of trusted requests, compared to a systematic total assurance approach.