With the rapid development of Virtual Private Network (VPN), many companies and organizations use VPN to implement their private communication. Traditionally, VPN uses security protocols to protect the confidentiality...With the rapid development of Virtual Private Network (VPN), many companies and organizations use VPN to implement their private communication. Traditionally, VPN uses security protocols to protect the confidentiality of data, the message integrity and the endpoint authentication. One core technique of VPN is tunneling, by which clients can access the in- ternal servers traversing VPN. However, the tunneling technique also introduces a concealed security hole. It is possible that if one vicious user can establish tunneling by the VPN server, he can compromise the internal servers behind the VPN server. So this paper presents a novel Application-layer based Centralized Information Access Control (ACIAC) for VPN to solve this problem. To implement an efficient, flexible and multi-decision access control model, we present two key techniques to ACIAC—the centralized management mechanism and the stream-based access control. Firstly, we implement the information center and the constraints/events center for ACIAC. By the two centers, we can provide an abstract access control mechanism, and the material access control can be decided dynamically by the ACIAC’s constraint/event mechanism. Then we logically classify the VPN communication traffic into the access stream and the data stream so that we can tightly couple the features of VPN communication with the access control model. We also provide the design of our ACIAC prototype in this paper.展开更多
Remote access is a means of accessing resources outside one’s immediate physical location. This has made employee mobility more effective and productive for most organizations. Remote access can be achieved via vario...Remote access is a means of accessing resources outside one’s immediate physical location. This has made employee mobility more effective and productive for most organizations. Remote access can be achieved via various channels of remote communication, the most common being Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The demand for remote access is on the rise, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, and will continue to increase as most organizations are re-structuring to make telecommuting a permanent part of their mode of operation. Employee mobility, while presenting organizations with some advantages, comes with the associated risk of exposing corporate cyber assets to attackers. The remote user and the remote connectivity technology present some vulnerabilities which can be exploited by any threat agent to violate the confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA) dimensions of these cyber assets. So, how are users and remote devices authenticated? To what extent is the established connection secured? With employee mobility on the rise, it is necessary to analyze the user authentication role since the mobile employee is not under the monitoring radar of the organization, and the environment from which the mobile employee connects may be vulnerable. In this study, an experiment was setup to ascertain the user authentication roles. The experiment showed the process of 2FA in user authentication and it proved to be an effective means of improving user authentication during remote access. This was depicted via the use of what the user has (mobile phone/soft-token) as a second factor in addition to what the user knows, i.e. password. This authentication method overcomes the security weaknesses inherent in single-factor user authentication via the use of password only. However, the results also showed that though 2FA user authentication ensures security, the remote devices could exhibit further vulnerabilities and pose serious risks to the organization. Thus, a varied implementation was recommended to further enhance the security of remote access communication with regards to the remote user authentication.展开更多
基金Project (No. 60373088) supported by the National Natural ScienceFoundation of China
文摘With the rapid development of Virtual Private Network (VPN), many companies and organizations use VPN to implement their private communication. Traditionally, VPN uses security protocols to protect the confidentiality of data, the message integrity and the endpoint authentication. One core technique of VPN is tunneling, by which clients can access the in- ternal servers traversing VPN. However, the tunneling technique also introduces a concealed security hole. It is possible that if one vicious user can establish tunneling by the VPN server, he can compromise the internal servers behind the VPN server. So this paper presents a novel Application-layer based Centralized Information Access Control (ACIAC) for VPN to solve this problem. To implement an efficient, flexible and multi-decision access control model, we present two key techniques to ACIAC—the centralized management mechanism and the stream-based access control. Firstly, we implement the information center and the constraints/events center for ACIAC. By the two centers, we can provide an abstract access control mechanism, and the material access control can be decided dynamically by the ACIAC’s constraint/event mechanism. Then we logically classify the VPN communication traffic into the access stream and the data stream so that we can tightly couple the features of VPN communication with the access control model. We also provide the design of our ACIAC prototype in this paper.
文摘Remote access is a means of accessing resources outside one’s immediate physical location. This has made employee mobility more effective and productive for most organizations. Remote access can be achieved via various channels of remote communication, the most common being Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The demand for remote access is on the rise, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, and will continue to increase as most organizations are re-structuring to make telecommuting a permanent part of their mode of operation. Employee mobility, while presenting organizations with some advantages, comes with the associated risk of exposing corporate cyber assets to attackers. The remote user and the remote connectivity technology present some vulnerabilities which can be exploited by any threat agent to violate the confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA) dimensions of these cyber assets. So, how are users and remote devices authenticated? To what extent is the established connection secured? With employee mobility on the rise, it is necessary to analyze the user authentication role since the mobile employee is not under the monitoring radar of the organization, and the environment from which the mobile employee connects may be vulnerable. In this study, an experiment was setup to ascertain the user authentication roles. The experiment showed the process of 2FA in user authentication and it proved to be an effective means of improving user authentication during remote access. This was depicted via the use of what the user has (mobile phone/soft-token) as a second factor in addition to what the user knows, i.e. password. This authentication method overcomes the security weaknesses inherent in single-factor user authentication via the use of password only. However, the results also showed that though 2FA user authentication ensures security, the remote devices could exhibit further vulnerabilities and pose serious risks to the organization. Thus, a varied implementation was recommended to further enhance the security of remote access communication with regards to the remote user authentication.
