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Towards tracking data flows in cloud architectures

2020 , Kunz, I. , Casola, V. , Schneider, A. , Banse, C. , Schütte, J.

As cloud services become central in an increasing number of applications, they process and store more personal and business-critical data. At the same time, privacy and compliance regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU ePrivacy regulation, and the upcoming EU Cybersecurity Act raise the bar for secure processing and traceability of critical data. Especially the demand to provide information about existing data records of an individual and the ability to delete them on demand is central in privacy regulations. Common to these requirements is that cloud providers must be able to track data as it flows across the different services to ensure that it never moves outside of the legitimate realm, and it is known at all times where a specific copy of a record that belongs to a specific individual or business process is located. However, current cloud architectures do neither provide the means to holistically track data flows across different services nor to enforce policies on data flows. In this paper, we point out the deficits in the data flow tracking functionalities of major cloud providers by means of a set of practical experiments. We then generalize from these experiments introducing a generic architecture that aims at solving the problem of cloud-wide data flow tracking and show how it can be built in a Kubernetes-based prototype implementation.

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Generating threat profiles for cloud service certification systems

2016 , Stephanow, P. , Banse, C. , Schütte, J.

Cloud service certification aims at automatically validating whether a cloud service satisfies a predefined set of requirements. To that end, certification systems collect and evaluate sensitive data from various sources of a cloud service. At the same time, the certification system itself has to be resilient to attacks to generate trustworthy statements about the cloud service. Thus system architects are faced with the task of assessing the trustworthiness of different certification system designs. To cope with that challenge, we propose a method to model different architecture variants of cloud service certification systems and analyze threats these systems face. By applying our method to a specific cloud service certification system, we show how threats to such systems can be derived in a standardized way that allows us to evaluate different architecture configurations.

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ZKLaims: Privacy-preserving Attribute-based Credentials using Non-interactive Zero-knowledge Techniques

2019 , Schanzenbach, M. , Kilian, T. , Schütte, J. , Banse, C.

In this paper we present ZKlaims: a system that allows users to present attribute-based credentials in a privacy-preserving way. We achieve a zero-knowledge property on the basis of Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (SNARKs). ZKlaims allow users to prove statements on credentials issued by trusted third parties. The credential contents are never revealed to the verifier as part of the proving process. Further, ZKlaims can be presented non-interactively, mitigating the need for interactive proofs between the user and the verifier. This allows ZKlaims to be exchanged via fully decentralized services and storages such as traditional peer-to-peer networks based on distributed hash tables (DHTs) or even blockchains. To show this, we include a performance evaluation of ZKlaims and show how it can be integrated in decentralized identity provider services.

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Practical Decentralized Attribute-Based Delegation Using Secure Name Systems

2018 , Schanzenbach, M. , Banse, C. , Schütte, J.

Identity and trust in the modern Internet are centralized around an oligopoly of identity service providers consisting solely of major tech companies. The problem with centralizing trust has become evident in recent discoveries of mass surveillance and censorship programs as well as information leakage through hacking incidents. One approach to decentralizing trust is distributed, attribute-based access control via attribute-based delegation (ABD). Attribute-based delegation allows a large number of cross-domain attribute issuers to be used in making authorization decisions. Attributes are not only issued to identities, but can also be delegated to other attributes issued by different entities in the system. The resulting trust chains can then be resolved by any entity given an appropriate attribute storage and resolution system. While current proposals often fail at the practicability, we show how attribute-based delegation can be realized on top of the secure GNU Name System (GNS) to solve an authorization problem in a real-world scenario.