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Traditionally, security and economics functionalities in IT financial services and protocols (FinTech) have been perceived as separate objectives. We argue that keeping them separate is a bad idea for FinTech “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). In fact, security and economics are one for DAOs: we show that the failure of a security property, e.g. anonymity, can destroy a DAOs because economic attacks can be tailgated to security attacks. This is illustrated by the examples of “TheDAO” (built on the Ethereum platform) and the DAOed version of a Futures Exchange. We claim that security and economics vulnerabilities, which we named seconomics vulnerabilities, are indeed new “beasts” to be reckoned with.

Current evaluations of automatic program repair (APR) techniques focus on tools' effectiveness, while little is known about the practical aspects of using APR tools, such as how long one should wait for a tool to generate a bug fix. In this work, we empirically study whether APR tools are any time algorithms (e.g., the more time they have, the more fixes they generate, so it makes sense to trade off longer time for better quality). Our preliminary experiment shows that the amount of plausible patches, given exponentially greater time, only increases linearly or not at all.

International audience; Security-by-Contract (S×C) is a novel paradigm providing security assurances for mobile applications. In this work, we present an extension of S×C enriched with an automatic trust management infrastructure. Indeed, we enhance the already existing architecture by adding new modules and configurations for contracts managing. At deploy-time, our system decides the run-time configuration depending on the credentials of the contract provider. Roughly, the run-time environment can both enforce a security policy and monitor the declared contract. According to the actual behaviour of the running program our architecture updates the trust level associated with the contract provider. The main advantage of this method is an automatic management of the level of trust of software and contract releasers.

Security Requirements Engineering is emerging as a branch of Software Engineering, spurred by the realization that security must be dealt with early on during the requirements phase. Methodologies in this field are challenging, as they must take into account subtle notions such as trust (or lack thereof), delegation, and permission; they must also model entire organizations and not only systems-to-be. In our previous work we introduced Secure Tropos, a formal framework for modeling and analyzing security requirements. Secure Tropos is founded on three main notions: ownership, trust, and delegation. In this paper we refine Secure Tropos introducing the notions of at-least delegation and trust of execution; also, at-most delegation and trust of permission. We also propose monitoring as a security design pattern intended to overcome the problem of lack of trust between actors. The paper presents a semantics for these notions, and describes an implemented formal reasoning tool based on Datalog.

Pushed by market forces, software development has become fast-paced. As a consequence, modern development projects are assembled from 3rd-party components. Security & privacy assurance techniques once designed for large, controlled updates over months or years, must now cope with small, continuous changes taking place within a week, and happening in sub-components that are controlled by third-party developers one might not even know they existed. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the current software security approaches and evaluate their appropriateness in the face of the changed nature in software development. Software security assurance could benefit by switching from a process-based to an artefact-based approach. Further, security evaluation might need to be more incremental, automated and decentralized. We believe this can be achieved by supporting mechanisms for lightweight and scalable screenings that are applicable to the entire population of software components albeit there might be a price to pay., 7 pages, 1 figure, to be published in Proceedings of International Conference on Software Engineering - New Ideas and Emerging Results

Protecting privacy means to ensure users that access to their personal data complies with their preferences. However, information can be manipulated in order to derive new objects that may disclose part of the original information. Therefore, control of information flow is necessary for guaranteeing privacy protection since users should know and control not only who access their personal data, but also who access information derived from their data. Actually, current approaches for access control do not provide support for managing propagation of information and for representing user preferences.This paper proposes to extend the Flexible Authorization Framework (FAF) in order to automatically verify whether a subject is entitled to process personal data and derive the authorizations associated with the outcome of data processing. In order to control information flow, users may specify the range of authorizations that can be associated with objects derived from their data. The framework guarantees that every "valid" derived object does not disclose more information than users want and preserves the permissions that users want to maintain. To make the discussion more concrete, we illustrate the proposal with a bank case study.

The introduction of information technologies in health care systems often requires to re-engineer the business processes used to deliver care. Obviously, the new and re-engineered processes are observationally different and thus we cannot use existing model-based techniques to argue that they are somehow “equivalent”. In this paper we propose a method for passing from SI*, a modeling language for capturing and modeling functional, security, and trust organizational and system requirements, to business process specifications and vice versa. In particular, starting from an old secure business process, we reconstruct the functional and security requirements at organizational level that such a business process was supposed to meet (including the trust relations that existed among the members of the organization). To ensure that the re-engineered business process meets the elicited requirements, we employ a notion of equivalence based on goal-equivalence. Basically, we verify if the execution of the business process, described in terms of the trace it generates, satisfies the organizational model. We motivate and illustrate the method with an e-health case study.

If all applications could be loaded at the start this would boil down to information flow analysis for which many solutions exist, but this is precisely what we want to overcome. When applications are not known in advance and can be updated asynchronously and possibly without connection to trusted third parties, we must preserve the security policies of the various owners of the applets during such autonomous evolution. This chapter illustrates the extension of the Security-by-Contract approach from mobile phones to smart cards: Security-by-Contract is based on the loading time application certification on the card that will enable the card to make autonomous decisions on application and policy updates while ensuring the compliance of every change of the platform with the security policy of each application’s owner.

When we model and analyze trust in organizations or information systems we have to take into account two different levels of analysis: social and individual. Social levels define the structure of organizations, whereas individual levels focus on individual agents. This is particularly important when capturing security requirements where a “normally” trusted organizational role can be played by an untrusted individual.Our goal is to model and analyze the two levels finding the link between them and supporting the automatic detection of conflicts that can come up when agents play roles in the organization. We also propose a formal framework that allows for the automatic verification of security requirements between the two levels by using Datalog and has been implemented in CASE tool.

Security has become one of the primary factors that cloud customers consider when they select a cloud provider for migrating their data and applications into the Cloud. To this end, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has provided the Consensus Assessment Questionnaire (CAIQ), which consists of a set of questions that providers should answer to document which security controls their cloud offerings support. In this paper, we adopted an empirical approach to investigate whether the CAIQ facilitates the comparison and ranking of the security offered by competitive cloud providers. We conducted an empirical study to investigate if comparing and ranking the security posture of a cloud provider based on CAIQ&rsquo, s answers is feasible in practice. Since the study revealed that manually comparing and ranking cloud providers based on the CAIQ is too time-consuming, we designed an approach that semi-automates the selection of cloud providers based on CAIQ. The approach uses the providers&rsquo, answers to the CAIQ to assign a value to the different security capabilities of cloud providers. Tenants have to prioritize their security requirements. With that input, our approach uses an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to rank the providers&rsquo, security based on their capabilities and the tenants&rsquo, requirements. Our implementation shows that this approach is computationally feasible and once the providers&rsquo, answers to the CAIQ are assessed, they can be used for multiple CSP selections. To the best of our knowledge this is the first approach for cloud provider selection that provides a way to assess the security posture of a cloud provider in practice.