[NCSA] NC*SA Meeting Today: Privilege Messaging: An Authorization Framework over Email Infrastructure

[NC*SA Announcements List - Moderated]

Reminder:
Please notice the NC*SA meeting is TODAY. We will have Dr. Kang
presenting a very interesting Email Infrastructure to this meeting.
--Liyun Yu
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The next meeting of the North Carolina System Administrators
organization (NC*SA) is Monday June 11th, 2007. Details
about the meeting are provided in this note.  We hope to see you there!

                     NC*SA General Meeting
                7:00 pm Monday, June 11, 2007
                 Location: MCNC, Building #3
                          Durham, NC


Topic: Privilege Messaging: An Authorization Framework over Email Infrastructure

Speaker: Brent ByungHoon Kang
         College of Computing and Informatics
         University of North Carolina at Charlotte

NCSA Sponsors:  EqualLogic - http://www.equallogic.com
                Network Appliance - http://www.netapp.com
                Crossover Lending Group - http://www.crossoverlending.com
                IBM: http://www.ibm.com
                MCNC - http://www.mcnc.org
                TriLUG - http://www.trilug.org

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Abstract:

The current email infrastructure is burdened by multiple resource constraints
and a plethora of security issues. Apart from the fact that email users are
spending time and effort sifting through unsolicited emails, more serious
problems such as Phishing are on the rise. This can be attributed to a
fundamental shortcoming in the current email infrastructure: a lack of an
authorization framework, which allows any user to create content in anyone's
mailbox. In this talk, we revisit the fundamental problem of non-existent
authorization and discuss the design of an effective authorization service
overlaying the existing email infrastructure. We propose Privilege Messaging
(P-Messaging), a fine-granular authorization framework that operates on the
principle that a sender requires a set of privileges in order to send messages,
simultaneously enables the receiver's infrastructure server to verify the
messages before accepting it. We present a prototype implementation and
discuss its benefits. An automatic classification of email can be effectively
performed based on the privilege-tag. Privilege-tag can provide more flexible
and fine-granular reputation management than current domain-based solutions
The use of privilege-tag as entry ID in a white-list can be more manageable
than the use of an individual email address. Finally, the privilege-tag can
be used as an email header, retaining the benefits of currently deployed MTA
architecture, namely, reliability and flexibility.

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Biography:

Brent Hoon Kang received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University
of California at Berkeley, working on the Berkeley Digital Library and
OceanStore project. Prior to Berkeley, he received an M.S. in Computer
Science from the University of Maryland at College Park, and a B.S. in
Computer Science and Statistics from Seoul National University with 1st
place distinction among computer science majors. Since fall 2004, he has
been an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at
Charlotte. He is currently leading the Infrastructure Systems Research
(ISR) Lab with a focus on IT infrastructure design and administration
issues related to protecting IT systems against security threats such as
bots/malwares and enforcing accountability to resolve email spam/phishing
problems. His works were published in USENIX LISA 2005 and 2006 (Large
Installation System Administration Conference). Recently, his collaboration
work on peer-to-peer bot has been published at the USENIX HotBots2007 (Hot
Topics in Understanding Botnets Workshop) and has been featured in
pcworld.com, eweek.com, CSO online, techworld.com, and Symantec news.

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Our meetings are free and open to anyone with an interest in the topic
of the evening and/or system administration.  We will be providing
food and drink for the evening.  If you have any questions please
contact the Steering Committee at:

 ncsa-steer at ncsysadmin.org

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Directions to the meeting are available on the web at
http://www.ncsysadmin.org/directions.html
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