The Data And System Security

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

"As wide area systems grow in scale, so do their exposure to threats." Recent research shows that the threat to modern day systems is growing with the growth of technology. This leads us to giving more importance to the security of the system. The security has been a major issue over the years and will be the same for the years to come. With the threats increasing there are many security measures taken into consideration which are giving good results in keeping the data and system secure. The data is stored over the networks or using the clouds which needs to be secured from being leaked to any intruder, thus security of data has to be good enough to tackle the problems arising with the data intrusion. To overcome some of these issues a trusted hardware may be used which gives more assurance of the data and system security. Several hardware systems are being considered to give the security issues a solution. Another way of dealing the security issues could be a trusted third party, who takes the data from the sender and securely hands it over the receiver. At times replication of data also leads to some security issues which can be handled using a trusted hardware being uses and solving the issues. This leads to fault tolerance which happens to be giving rise to ‘equivocation’ ("A simple yet powerful tool of selfish and malicious participants in a distributed system"). Byzantine Fault tolerance used the replicated systems so as to make the protocols more efficient and accountable. ‘More the growth of technology, more the threat and security issues with it’. Thus, the main criteria is to provide security and assurance to the data and the system despite the malicious software’s and intruders.

IMPORTANT IDEAS:

The main idea is the security issue with systems and the use of trusted hardware to overcome the issues. Data is stored over the network or in cloud servers offered by the cloud providers. This service provided by the cloud providers should be trustworthy and reliable, not revealing the data to any other person.

As Andreas Haerberlen mentioned in his paper about the cloud computing service provided by the provider should be accountable and reliable. Both the user as well as the provider should be able to check the proper functioning of the cloud. He mainly put through the idea that the cloud service comes with a risk for both customer as well as the provider. The computation and data security should be very much risk free and secured. The customer puts forward his request on the system for data computation which may be accessed by an unauthorized person which leads to data loss. The customer has the risk of losing his data to the person he doesn’t know and would not want him to access his private data. Many problems arise between the customer and provider during computation of the data. The reliability of the fault tolerance systems needs to be checked to have the cloud service running perfectly for both the provider as well as the user. Cloud systems have become popular now and have many benefits. But the organizations need to take care by preventing the hackers/intruders from making the wrong use of the services and avoiding any problems or errors.

Basically, Andreas wants to give an overview of the security flaws the cloud service comes with. Which he defends with the security flaws encountered in the process of keeping the data secured. Another concern with the cloud is the fault tolerance which he refers as to causing problems to the customers. Fault tolerance techniques help in avoiding the system failures. The low cost of fault tolerance is a good benefit for the provider to have good service at low cost.

Christopher Fletcher uses the idea of security with the help of encryption. Firstly, he has his view over the cloud services provided were he talks about the problems which are encountered with these cloud servers and in outsourcing computation. He mainly uses the security of the data and system as his major concern going by the encryption techniques available to keep the data secure. The data can be encrypted by the user by using a key which is only accessible to the receiver. This doesn’t allow the intruder to get the data in readable form, which is of no use to the intruder. The secured key with the encrypted data is of immense help as the sender knows that even if the intruder gets access to the data, cannot make use of it as he cannot understand it. Also another way to keep the data secured is a trusted third party, may be a person or a trusted hardware/software. This helps in a way as the trusted third party is always accountable if he goes wrong or if the trusted hardware faces any failure. In a way it gives the sender a reliable option to send the data. Not denying the fact that the third party may be faulty, but mostly it doesn’t happen and the third party is always trustworthy. The user provides encrypted format to a non-trusted program with the encrypted computation. Further, it needs to be with a clear idea of the guarantees for the privacy of the data. Privacy of the data is main problem in the cloud service which needs to be conflict free with no hardware issues. There are secure processors which use encrypted data storage for the purpose of giving support to the hardware and avoid any contradiction.

An instance of uses keys could be the use of public and private keys with their own features to guide them through. A secure process is needed to carry out the process. One of its kind is the ‘Ascend’ which supports computation of the programs an accountable server. The Ascend does it’s processing privately and does not involve the data programs. Privacy of data is the major task of Ascend. It does not get into the data programs to avoid any untoward program to clash and fail while programming. There are secure processors which use encrypted data storage for the purpose of giving support to the hardware and avoid any contradiction to the data.

Dave Levin mentioned in his paper about the increase in threats with the advancement of technology. Over the past decade the security issues have increased in a large margin. According to Dave the security issues of the system should be given the most importance as it is the major task of the intruder as the intruder waits for a security flaw in the system to make his job easy and attack it. Equivocation which is a simple tool for the intruders to attack a distributed system has been used as a main weapon for security malfunctions. Equivocation is basically the Byzantine faults which require minimum participation to tolerate it. It gives an insight on the observations of the conflicting statements and the solutions for equivocation and implementations which monitor the contradiction. A trusted hardware ‘TrInc’ is used to conflict the equivocation in large distributed systems. TrInc is a simple and trustable hardware. TrInc uses the cryptographic key for the processing. Using a cryptography key gives transparency to the data and the data is not accessible to any intruder who tries to attack. The same key will be available to the receiver who upon receiving it will use the key to access the data in a readable format. TrInc is an inspiration of Append Only Memory (A2M). A2M was the one which introduced the idea of trusted log to improve the system security. A2M is reliable and trustworthy hardware application. It improves the amount of fault tolerance to Byzantine faults. A2M uses a unique sequence number while processing.

The basic idea proposed by Allen Clement is the fault tolerance system. He makes a point mentioning the fault tolerance problems and the things to deal with it which helps in the data and system security. These deal with the system security by keeping the system away from any kind of fault to be occurred. Fault tolerance system using a trusted hardware gives a better security option. Non-equivocation has been discussed in the paper which is used to reduce the byzantine faults in the system. The idea of the paper is the introduction of trusted hardware to every process running in a Byzantine fault tolerance system which is repeated. This makes the system more efficient by reducing the number of processes that are required to build a replicated state machine. Proposals are given to add some trusted hardware to each and every replica in the fault tolerance system. This is done to decrease the replication factor and eliminate defaults to avoid equivocation. The fault tolerance model is important for building the protocols that help in restoring the crashed processes. These processes of replicas are many in number but don’t solve the fault tolerance model and use expensive mechanism for the replication of the entire system.

Non-equivocation is unable to reduce the number of processes required to solve the agreement in the system. Non-equivocation is used to validate a pair from the given process. This uses a key and a message. This guarantees that any other contradicting message in the process cannot use the same key. It is used to design the systems that tolerate the Byzantine faults. Another factor here is the replication factor. Replication often leads to danger of being attacked ie; risk always follows up with replication. There are many security flaws using replication in the system. Translation is implemented to get over the faults occurring in the process. Using translation the faults occurring in the processes can be minimized and also eliminated.

CONCLUSION:

The major issues of the processes has been it’s security, the security of the data and the systems. To add to it the use of trusted hardware has been a major advancement. The main concern of any organization is to provide good and accountable security to the customers. The running processes should always be secured.

Dave Levin put forward that the TrInc was introduces through A2M which was based on improving the system security, but to some extent as it shows that A2M failed to impress and couldn’t accomplish it’s task. Coming to Christopher Fletcher, he mentioned about trusted third party or hardware. But at times the hardware may fail, resulting in the loss of complete data. This would also open loop holes for a security breach or intrusion by an intruder. Also at some point of time a trusted third party may betray the customer and perform a security breach himself. With Allen Clement we come across the Byzantine fault tolerance. The trusted hardware is implemented to have better security option for the system.

Cloud computing is one the major advancement of technology. Services provided by the cloud providers are of immense use. These services are being used to the full extent and giving the desired results to the users. But with such a helpful service comes the security issue. Service providers need to have more security techniques employed and keep the user’s data secured.

The most important thing I have learnt while doing research over this paper by following up with the other paper written by other author’s is the importance of security in a process. Mainly to keep the data and system secured its takes many different techniques and implementations. Also the use of trusted hardware for the data and system security is a good advancement for the security. Thus, to conclude the paper there are many security measures being employed, just to keep the data and systems secured which help in keeping the data and systems secured and avoiding a failure.