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Pasquier, Thomas

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Pasquier

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Thomas

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Pasquier, Thomas
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.be8d8e01-7afb-4baa-be68-1c65e6f3969a

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 20
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    Publication
    If these data could talk
    (Springer Nature, 2017) Pasquier, Thomas; Lau, Matthew; Trisovic, Ana; Boose, Emery; Couturier, Ben; Crosas, Merce; Ellison, Aaron; Gibson, Valerie; Jones, Chris R.; Seltzer, Margo
    In the last few decades, data-driven methods have come to dominate many fields of scientific inquiry. Open data and open-source software have enabled the rapid implementation of novel methods to manage and analyze the growing flood of data. However, it has become apparent that many scientfic fields exhibit distressingly low rates of repeatability and reproducibility. Although there are many dimensions to this issue, we believe that there is a lack of formalism used when describing end-to-end published results, from the data source to the analysis to the final published results. Even when authors do their best to make their research and data accessible, this lack of formalism reduces the clarity and effciency of reporting, which contributes to issues of reproducibility. Data provenance aids both repeatability and reproducibility through systematic and formal records of the relationships among data sources, processes, datasets, publications and researchers.
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    Camflow: Managed Data-Sharing for Cloud Services
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2017) Pasquier, Thomas; Singh, Jatinder; Eyers, David; Bacon, Jean
    A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud services within ‘Internet of Things’ architectures is driving the requirements for both protection and cross-application data sharing. These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a crucial issue once data has left its owner’s control by cloud-hosted applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing owners’ dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide visibility over data flows. This helps those responsible to meet their data management obligations, providing evidence of compliance, and aids in the identification of policy errors and misconfigurations. We present our IFC model and describe and evaluate our IFC architecture and implementation (CamFlow). This comprises an OS level implementation of IFC with support for application management, together with an IFC-enabled middleware. Our contribution is to demonstrate the feasibility of incorporating IFC into cloud services: we show how the incorporation of IFC into underlying IaaS or PaaS provided OSs would address application sharing and protection requirements, and more generally, greatly enhance the trustworthiness of cloud services at all levels, at little overhead, and transparently to tenants. Keywords—Security, Audit, Cloud, Information Flow Control, Middleware, Provenance, Linux Security Module, PaaS, Data Management, Compliance
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    Data Flow Management and Compliance in Cloud Computing
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2015-07) Bacon, Jean; Singh, Jatinder; Powles, Julia; Pasquier, Thomas
    As cloud computing becomes an increasingly dominant means of providing computing resources, the legal and regulatory issues associated with data in the cloud become more pronounced. These issues derive primarily from four areas: contract, data protection, law enforcement, and regulatory and common law protections for particularly sensitive domains such as health, finance, fiduciary relations, and intellectual property assets. From a technical perspective, these legal requirements all impose information management obligations on data sharing and transmission within cloud-hosted applications and services.
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    Managing Big Data with Information Flow Control
    (2015) Pasquier, Thomas; Singh, Jatinder; Bacon, Jean; Hermant, Olivier
    Concern about data leakage is holding back more widespread adoption of cloud computing by companies and public institutions alike. To address this, cloud tenants/applications are traditionally isolated in virtual machines or containers. But an emerging requirement is for cross-application sharing of data, for example, when cloud services form part of an IoT architecture. Information Flow Control (IFC) is ideally suited to achieving both isolation and data sharing as required. IFC enhances traditional Access Control by providing continuous, data-centric, cross- application, end-to-end control of data flows. However, large-scale data processing is a major requirement of cloud computing and is infeasible under standard IFC. We present a novel, enhanced IFC model that subsumes standard models. Our IFC model supports ‘Big Data’ processing, while retaining the simplicity of standard IFC and enabling more concise, accurate and maintainable expression of policy.
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    Integrating Messaging Middleware and Information Flow Control
    (2015) Pasquier, Thomas; Singh, Jatinder; Bacon, Jean; David, Eyers
    Security is an ongoing challenge in cloud computing. Currently, cloud consumers have few mechanisms for managing their data within the cloud provider’s infrastructure. Information Flow Control (IFC) involves attaching labels to data, to govern its flow throughout a system. We have worked on kernel-level IFC enforcement to protect data flows within a virtual machine (VM). This paper makes the case for, and demonstrates the feasibility of an IFC-enabled messaging middleware, to enforce IFC within and across applications, containers, VMs, and hosts. We detail how such middleware can integrate with local (kernel) enforcement mechanisms, and highlight the benefits of separating data management policy from application/service-logic.
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    Expressing and Enforcing Location Requirements in the Cloud Using Information Flow Control
    (2015) Pasquier, Thomas; Powles, Julia E.
    The adoption of cloud computing is increasing and its use is becoming widespread in many sectors. As cloud service provision increases, legal and regulatory issues become more significant. In particular, the international nature of cloud provision raises concerns over the location of data and the laws to which they are subject. In this paper we investigate Information Flow Control (IFC) as a possible technical solution to expressing, enforcing and demonstrating compliance of cloud computing systems with policy requirements inspired by data protection and other laws. We focus on geographic location of data, since this is the paradigmatic concern of legal/regulatory requirements on cloud computing and, to date, has not been met with robust technical solutions and verifiable data flow audit trails.
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    Information Flow Control for Strong Protection with Flexible Sharing in PaaS
    (2015) Pasquier, Thomas; Singh, Jatinder; Bacon, Jean
    The need to share data across applications is be- coming increasingly evident. Current cloud isolation mechanisms focus solely on protection, such as containers that isolate at the OS-level, and virtual machines that isolate through the hypervi- sor. However, by focusing rigidly on protection, these approaches do not provide for controlled sharing. This paper presents how Information Flow Control (IFC) offers a flexible alternative. As a data-centric mechanism it enables strong isolation when required, while providing continuous, fine grained control of the data being shared. An IFC-enabled cloud platform would ensure that policies are enforced as data flows across all applications, without requiring any special sharing mechanisms.
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    FlowK: Information Flow Control for the Cloud
    (2018-06-20) Pasquier, Thomas; Bacon, Jean; Eyers, David
    Security concerns are widely seen as an obstacle to the adoption of cloud computing solutions and although a wealth of law and regulation has emerged, the technical basis for enforcing and demonstrating compliance lags behind. Our CloudSafetyNet project aims to show that Information Flow Control (IFC) can augment existing security mechanisms and provide continuous enforcement of extended. finer-grained application-level security policy in the cloud. We present FlowK, a loadable kernel module for Linux, as part of a proof of concept that IFC can be provided for cloud computing. Following the principle of policy-mechanism separation, IFC policy is assumed to be expressed at application level and FlowK provides mechanisms to enforce IFC policy at runtime. FlowK’s design minimises the changes required to existing software when IFC is provided. To show how FlowK can be integrated with cloud software we have designed and evaluated a framework for deploying IFC-aware web applications, suitable for use in a PaaS cloud.
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    Regional clouds: technical considerations
    (2014) Pasquier, Thomas; Jean, Bacon; Jon, Crowcroft; Anil, Madhavapeddy; Jatinder, Singh; W. Kuan, Hon; Christopher, Millard
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    FlowR: Aspect Oriented Programming for Information Flow Control in Ruby
    (ACM, 2014) Pasquier, Thomas; Bacon, Jean; Shand, Brian
    This paper reports on our experience with providing Information Flow Control (IFC) as a library. Our aim was to support the use of an unmodified Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud infrastructure by IFC-aware web applications. We discuss how Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) overcomes the limitations of RubyTrack, our first approach. Although use of AOP has been mentioned as a possibility in past IFC literature we believe this paper to be the first illustration of how such an implementation can be attempted. We discuss how we built FlowR (Information Flow Control for Ruby), a library extending Ruby to provide IFC primitives using AOP via the Aquarium open source library. Previous attempts at providing IFC as a language extension required either modification of an interpreter or significant code rewriting. FlowR provides a strong separation between functional implementation and security constraints which supports easier development and maintenance; we illustrate with practical examples. In addition, we provide new primitives to describe IFC constraints on objects, classes and meth- ods that, to our knowledge, are not present in related work and take full advantage of an object oriented language (OO language). The experience reported here makes us confident that the tech- niques we use for Ruby can be applied to provide IFC for any Ob- ject Oriented Program (OOP) whose implementation language has an AOP library. D.2.2 [Software Engineer- ing]: Design Tools and Techniques; D.2.4 [Software Engineer- ing]: Software/Program Verification Keywords Information Flow Control, Aspect Oriented Program- ming, Security