Author: Dr. Shareeful Islam, Dr. Haralambos Mouratidis and Prof. Dr. Jan Jürjens

Abstract
Regulation compliance is getting more and more important for software systems that process and manage sensitive information. Therefore, identifying and analysing relevant legal regulations and aligning them with security requirements become necessary for the effective development of secure software systems. Nevertheless, Secure Software Engineering Modelling Languages (SSEML) use different concepts and terminology from those used in the legal domain for the description of legal regulations. This situation, together with the lack of appropriate background and knowledge of laws and regulations, introduces a challenge for software developers to elicit security requirements from the relevant laws and regulations and to trace the elicited requirements throughout the development stages. Our work contributes to develop a framework that supports the consideration of laws and regulations during the development of secure software systems. The proposed framework enables software developers (i) to correctly elicit security requirements from the appropriate laws and regulations; and (ii) to trace these requirements throughout the development stages in order to ensure that the design indeed supports the required laws and regulations. Our framework is based on existing work from the area of secure software engineering, and it complements this work with a novel and structured process and a well-defined method.

Short Bio
Dr. Shareeful Islam was awarded his PhD in Software Risk Management Model using goal-driven approach from chair of Software & Systems Engineering (I4), Technische Universität München, Germany. He has received M.Sc. degree in Information Communication System Security(ICSS) from the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He also received M.Sc. degree in Computer Science (CS)and B. Sc. (Hon’s) in applied physics and electronics (APE) from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed the ISO 9001:2001 lead auditor certification and is a certified quality management system auditor. He has more than 10 publication in well recognized journals. His main research interests are in the field of software risk management, software security and privacy. Special interests are risk management model, security and privacy, requirements engineering and modelling.

In August we will present our work on cloud storage security at the 20th USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco. The paper, in essence, outlines new attacks on cloud storage services that use server-side data deduplication.

It includes a security analysis of Dropbox, a popular cloud storage service. By manipulating the client software unauthorized data access becomes possible, if the hash values of the files are known to an attacker. This attack is completely undetectable to the victim, and novel compared to recent attacks discussed in the media. Data possession proofs which have been used so far in the context of assessing whether a cloud storage operator is still in possession of a file are the only countermeasure.

We further define online slack space as a method to hide data in the cloud to thwart forensic investigations. Compared to regular file slack all files are stored in the cloud without leaving any evidence on local persistent storage.

You can find the paper here: Dark Clouds on the Horizon: Using Cloud Storage as Attack Vector and Online Slack Space. We have contacted Dropbox and they implemented countermeasures for our attacks while investigating the use of data possession proofs on the client side.

The presentation firstly covers the basics properties of image local feature extraction algorithms. Then a little bit closer description of algorithm selected for the implementation – SURF – and the platform – FPGA. Then it contains a summary of reasons why a new completely custom solution has been developed. The main concepts of the developed hardware, FPGA and software design are described next. The presentation is concluded with the module key parameters summary and a short video (1 min) showing the actual image interest point detector results. June 22, 13:30.

Stefan Katzenbeisser talks about privacy and mobile security (starting at 14:43)

1030 am: Guest talk by John Tait

Patent Search – a Challenging Problem!

To be valid a patent has to show that it it describes a novel and useful idea. The test of novelty is that at the date of filing there does not exist in the public domain (in another patent, or the academic literature, or elsewhere, for example in the news media) an earlier description of the invention. This earlier, invalidating, description might well be presented in another language or using quite different technical terms from the way the idea is expressed in the patent in question. Thus patent search is a very challenging information retrieval problem.

Patent Search is also economically important. It is difficult to estimate the total value of the patents in the world economy, but it certainly runs into many billions of euros, and many thousands of people around the world are employed in the patent ecosystem: in Patent Offices; patent attorneys; translators; software and data suppliers; and elsewhere.

The talk will overview the field of patent search, relate it to developments in semantic search, and in particular review some of the recent work reported in our new book “Current Challenges in atent Information Retrieval”.

Managing director Markus Klemen gave two talks at the BildungOnline conference in Hall in Tirol focusing on Security in Social Media. The Austrian Computer Society (OCG) organized the talk. The target audience were teachers, students and parents. Information about the talk, including the presentation sheets may be found at http://journal.ocg.at/index.php/bildung-karriere/1315.