Piosk : A Practical Kiosk To Prevent Information Leakage

Abstract

One of important concerns in information security is to control information flow. It is whether to protect confidential information from being leaked, or to protect trusted information from being tainted. In this paper, we present Piosk (Physical blockage of Information flow Kiosk) that addresses both the problems practically. Piosk can forestall and prevent the leakage of information, and defend inner tangible assets against a variety of malwares as well. When a visitor who carries a re-writable portable storage device, must insert the device into Piosk installed next to the security gate. Then, Piosk scans the device at the very moment, and detects & repairs malicious codes that might be exist. After that, Piosk writes the contents (including sanitized ones) on a new read-only portable device such as a compact disk. By doing so, the leakage of internal information through both insiders and outsiders can be prevented physically. We have designed and prototyped Piosk. The experimental verification of the Piosk prototype implementation reveals that, Piosk can accurately detect every malware at the same detection level as Virus Total and effectively prevent the leakage of internal information. In addition, we compare Piosk with the state-of-the-art methods and describe the special advantages of Piosk over existing methods.

Figure 1. Piosk's overall architecture.

Figure 2. Piosk use case

Figure 3. Piosk prototype implementation and its detailed specification.

Figure 4. Four exemplary GUI screenshots for Piosk and its administrative system.

Table 1 Comparison of Piosk with other security kiosks