Section: New Results

Security

Most companies information systems are composed by heterogeneous components responsible of hosting, creating or manipulating critical information for the day-to-day operation of the company. Securing this information is therefore one of their main concerns, more particularly specifying Access Control (AC) policies. However, the task of implementing an AC security policy (sometimes relying on several mechanisms) remains complex and error prone as it requires knowing low level and vendor-specific facilities. In this context, discovering and understanding which security policies are actually being enforced by the Information System (IS) becomes critical. Thus, the main challenge consists in bridging the gap between the vendor-dependent security features and a higher-level representation. This representation has to express the policies by abstracting from the specificities of the system components, allowing security experts to better understand the policy and to implement all related evolution, refactoring and manipulation operations in a reusable way.

In 2013, we have tackled the aforementioned problems with respect to three key information system components: networks of firewalls, relational database systems and content management systems.

• Firewalls are a key element in network security. They are in charge of filtering the traffic of the network in compliance with a number of access-control rules that enforce a given security policy. In [33] we have described a model-driven reverse engineering approach able to extract the security policy implemented by a set of firewalls in a working network, easing the understanding, analysis and evolution of network security policies. In [17] we have extended this method to cope with a more complex and specific scenario, i.e, the management of stateful packet filtering.

• A similar approach have been successfully used to extract AC information from relational database systems. Concretely, in [32] we contribute a security metamodel and a reverse engineering process that combines standard database access-control rules with the fine-grained access control provided by triggers and stored procedures. The extraction of this comprehensive model helps security experts to visualize and manipulate database security policies in a vendor-independent manner.

• Out-of-the-box Web Content Management Systems (WCMSs) are the tool of choice for the development of millions of enterprise web sites. However, little attention has been brought to the analysis of how developers use the content protection mechanisms provided by WCMSs, in particular, Access-control (AC). We have proposed in [34] a metamodel tailored to the representation of WCMS AC policies, easing the analysis and manipulation tasks by abstracting from vendor-specific details.