Context-aware Intrusion Severity Analysis for Clouds
I undertook this project for my PhD research with overall objective to improve the security of Clouds. Specifically, the project involved addressing intrusion severity
analysis problem for Clouds. It involved identification of the fact that impact of a particular intrusion can have different impact on different applications primarily based on
their security characteristics. Due to distinguishing characteristics of Clouds such as; Mobility, Flexibility, Scale and Diversity, an efficient, dynamic and customized
mechanism is required to address intrusion severity analysis problem. This is envisaged to improve overall efficiency of intrusion response systems and enable provision of
customized quality of security service.
Proxy Credential Auditing (PCA) Infrastructure for NGS
The realization of single sign-on and delegation of privileges in accessing resources such as the UK e-Science National Grid Service (NGS) is usually facilitated by X.509-based Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) and exploitation of proxy certificates. It is the case however that proxy certificates, can potentially be obtained and abused by a malicious third party without the knowledge of the holder. This project is intended to address this issue directly by developing a secure auditing service. My responsibilities include collaborating with peers at University of Glasgow to develop a mechanism to identify patterns of misuse for the auditing information for proxy credentials. This is to facilitate prediction of previously unknown misuse patterns and thereby improving the security of infrastructures such as the NGS.
NCeSS e-Infrastructure for Social Science
The e-Infrastructure for Social Science is a project funded by UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) which leverages Grid technology to build an e-infrastructure to provide integrated and secure access to a variety of resources of social science research, including datasets, tools, services and easy-to-use user environments. My responsibility for this project has been for the security work package which involves establishing a secure infrastructure to fulfill the security requirements of the datasets, tools and services facilitated by the project.
Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science (MoSeS)
The objective of the project is to develop representation of the entire UK population as individuals and households, together with a package of modeling tools which allows specific research and policy questions to be addressed. The components of the MoSeS project are a baseline representation of the UK population; a dynamic modeling capability; a grid-enabled portal for policy analysis; and a series of application scenarios. My responsibilities for this project have been to investigate security issues mainly due to the data being used in this research and develop appropriate solutions for provision of secure access to the tools, datasets and services developed as part of the project.
