Posts Tagged ‘Security’
Self-managing computing technology
Posted on: July 30, 2011
IT-Business management systems
- Self managing computing systems have the ability to manage themselves and dynamically adapt to change in accordance with business policies and objectives. Self-managing systems can perform management activities based on situations they observe or sense in the IT environment.
- Self managing computing is the self-management of e-business infrastructure, balancing what is managed by the IT professional and what is managed by the system. It is the evolution of e-business.
Systems with self-managing components reduce the cost of owning and operating computer systems. Self-managing systems can perform management activities based on situations they observe or sense in the IT environment. Rather than IT professionals initiating management activities, the system observes something about itself and acts accordingly. This allows the IT professional to focus on high-value tasks while the technology manages the more mundane operations.
IT infrastructure components take on the following characteristics:
• self-configuring
• self-healing
• self-optimizing and self -protecting.
1 .Self-configuring :Systems adapt automatically to dynamically changing environments. When hardware and software systems have the ability to define themselves “on-the fly,” they are self-configuring. This aspect of self-managing means that new features, software, and servers can be dynamically added to the enterprise infrastructure with no disruption Systems adapt automatically to dynamically changing environments.
2. Self- healing: Systems discover, diagnose, and react to disruptions. For a system to be self-healing, it must be able to recover from a failed component by first detecting and isolating the failed component, taking it off line, fixing or isolating the failed component, and reintroducing the fixed or replacement component into service without any apparent application disruption. Systems will need to predict problems and take actions to prevent the failure from having an impact on applications.
3 .Self-optimizing :Systems monitor and tune resources automatically. Self-optimization requires hardware and software systems to efficiently maximize resource utilization to meet end-user needs without human intervention.
4 .Self-protecting :Systems anticipate, detect, identify, and protect themselves from attacks from anywhere. Self-protecting systems must have the ability to define and manage user access to all computing resources within the enterprise, to protect against unauthorized resource access, to detect intrusions and report and prevent these activities as they occur, and to provide backup and recovery capabilities that are as secure as the original resource management systems. Systems will need to build on top of a number of core security technologies already available today. Capabilities must be provided to more easily understand and handle user identities in various contexts, removing the burden from administrator
VeriSign Identity Protection
- VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service helps companies to mitigate risk and maintain compliance with a scalable, reliable Two-Factor Authentication platform delivered without the high cost of infrastructure and operations.
- With VIP Authentication Service, the end user experiences a fast response and the assurance that their identity is protected by an added layer of security
A Scalable, Reliable Platform
Our flexible platform is highly available, scalable and reliable, leveraging VeriSign’s expertise in running on-demand, critical Internet infrastructure globally. With VIP, the end user’s identity information stays within your enterprise; only the security code and credential ID pass anonymously to VeriSign for validation.
A Convenient Choice of Credentials
- VIP Authentication Service supports a range of OATH-compliant credential form factors to meet the diverse needs of end users. Enterprise customers who use VIP have immediate access to the most convenient and cost effective form factors available for employees, business partners and customers.
- Freely available credentials for mobile handsets and PC desktops dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership for typical Two-Factor Authentication solutions. VeriSign also offers the most deployed and innovative hardware credentials including tokens and credit card-sized credentials.
Preferred for the Enterprise
End Users may use their VIP credential on any participating Web site that displays the VeriSign Identity Protection logo. VIP Network Members include eBay, PayPal, AOL and more.
VeriSign® Identity Protection (VIP) Access for Mobile turns a mobile phone into a two-factor authentication security device
VIP service
How It Works
- Most enterprise networks and externally facing Web sites require a username and password to identify you online. But usernames and passwords can be cracked, hacked and faked. Your VIP Access for Mobile verifies your identity by generating a unique security code or one-time password each time you use it.
- Use your VIP Access for Mobile to protect your identity, financial assets, and privacy when you sign-in to your enterprise or leading Web sites like PayPal, eBay, AOL, and other Web sites displaying the VIP Network Member logo.
Polymorphic virus
Posted on: May 14, 2011
- A POLYMORPHIC virus produces varied but operational copies of itself.
- These strategies have been employed in the hope that virus scanners (see D1) will not be able to detect all instances of the virus.
- One method of evading scan string-driven virus detectors is self-encryption with a variable key.
- These viruses (e.g. Cascade) are not termed “polymorphic”, as their decryption code is always the same. Therefore the decryptor can be used as a scan string by the simplest scan string-driven virus scanners.
A technique for making a polymorphic virus is to choose among a variety of different encryption schemes requiring different decryption routines: only one of these routines would be plainly visible in any instance of the virus (e.g. the Whale virus).
A scan string-driven virus scanner would have to exploit several scan strings (one for each possible decryption method) to reliably identify a virus of this kind.
More sophisticated polymorphic viruses (e.g. V2P6) vary the sequences of instructions in their variants by interspersing the decryption instructions with “noise” instructions (e.g. a No Operation instruction or an instruction to load a currently unused register with an arbitrary value), by interchanging mutually independent instructions, or even by using various instruction sequences with identical net effects (e.g. Subtract A from A, and Move 0 to A).
A simple-minded, scan string-based virus scanner would not be able to reliably identify all variants of this sort of virus; rather, a sophisticated “scanning engine” has to be constructed after thorough research into the particular virus.
- One of the most sophisticated forms of polymorphism used so far is the “Mutation Engine” (MtE) which comes in the form of an object module.
- With the Mutation Engine any virus can be made polymorphic by adding certain calls to its assembler source code and linking to the mutation-engine and random-number generator modules.
- The advent of polymorphic viruses has rendered virus-scanning an ever more difficult and expensive endeavor; adding more and more scan strings to simple scanners will not adequately deal with these viruses.
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