Project Information Summary for:

Authentic—Authentication Attacks and Controls

Leszek T. Lilien

Department of Computer Science

Western Michigan University

Also affiliated with:

Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

at Purdue University

 

 

Project Name:         Authentic—Authentication Attacks and Controls

 

Purpose:  Privacy protocol development, prevention of privacy  disclosures

                      

 

Brief Project Description

 

In Project Authentic, we are investigating authorization attacks and controls. We are also developing a protocol that provides an efficient way of giving control of private data back to their “owners” or their trusted “guardians.” We plan to experiment with a mechanism based on trust and context-awareness, which provides privacy solutions for data access.  It is based on the ideas of bundling metadata with data, blocking access when vulnerable to disclosure, and controlled abstraction of protected data for general use (cf. references below).

 

Extensive experimentation in a distributed environment of a realistic size is essential to improving design and evaluating it.

 

 

Experimentation in Authentic: The DETER Environment

We use the DETER testbed  (www.isi.deterlab.net) due to security risks that the project would pose if pursued on the Internet. In particular, we need to trigger many kinds of authentication and privacy attacks on the nodes implementing our mechanism. This would violate privacy and security of users if run on the Internet.

 

 

Project Funding

Funded by grants:

1)     NSF IIS-0242840: Vulnerability Analysis and Threat Assessment/Avoidance  (PI: B. Bhargava, co-PI: L. Lilien)

2)     NSF IIS-0209059: Formalizing Evidence and Trust for User Authorization (PI: B. Bhargava)

 

 

References:

L. Lilien and B. Bhargava, ”A Scheme for Privacy-preserving Data Dissemination,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (to appear).

 B. Bhargava and L. Lilien, “Private and Trusted Collaborations,” Proc. Secure Knowledge Management (SKM 2004): A Workshop, Amherst, NY, Sep. 2004.