UWSpace is currently experiencing technical difficulties resulting from its recent migration to a new version of its software. These technical issues are not affecting the submission and browse features of the site. UWaterloo community members may continue submitting items to UWSpace. We apologize for the inconvenience, and are actively working to resolve these technical issues.
 

An Implementation of 5G-AKA and a Usability Analysis of OpenLDAP Access Control Lists (ACLs)

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Date

2021-08-27

Authors

Punchhi, Rahul

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

University of Waterloo

Abstract

We address two pieces of work: (i) an implementation of the Authentication and Key Agreement protocol suite from the 5th generation cellular communications standards (5G-AKA) that we intend to make available as open-source, and, (ii) a categorization using Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) of errors made by human participants in a study carried out on the usability of Access Control Lists (ACLs) in the OpenLDAP directory. Our work (i) on 5G-AKA is motivated by the lack of availability of such an implementation that can then be used by researchers and practitioners for further work. We discuss design choices we have made; for example, our choice of the Java programming language and cryptographic packages, and our choice to model the three entities that communicate using 5G-AKA, the User Equipment (UE), the Serving Network (SN), and the Home Network (HN) as three distinct processes that communicate over TCP sockets. We also discuss challenges we encountered in carrying out our work, and the manner in which we plan to make our work available as open-source. Our work (ii) on error-identification in the use of ACLs in OpenLDAP is part of a broader human-subject study that, in turn, is motivated by public pronouncements of their poor usability. We discuss what HTAs are, and why they are appropriate for our work. We present our design of the HTAs, the errors we identified using them, and observe that this work helps with a prospective redesign of ACLs for OpenLDAP.

Description

Keywords

5G-AKA, 5G, OpenLDAP, usability, ACL, access control list

LC Keywords

Citation