Secure & trusted communication in emergency situations

In this paper we propose SETS, a protocol with main aim to provide secure and private communication during emergency situations. SETS achieves security of the exchanged information, attack resilience and user’s privacy. In addition, SETS can be easily adapted for mobile devices, since field experimental results show the effectiveness of the protocol on actual smart-phone platforms

A Fault-Tolerant Emergency-Aware Access Control Scheme for Cyber-Physical Systems

Access control is an issue of paramount importance in cyber-physical systems (CPS). In this paper, an access control scheme, namely FEAC, is presented for CPS. FEAC can not only provide the ability to control access to data in normal situations, but also adaptively assign emergency-role and permissions to specific subjects and inform subjects without explicit access requests to handle emergency situations in a proactive manner. In FEAC, emergency-group and emergency-dependency are introduced. Emergencies are processed in sequence within the group and in parallel among groups. A priority and dependency model called PD-AGM is used to select optimal response-action execution path aiming to eliminate all emergencies that occurred within the system. Fault-tolerant access control polices are used to address failure in emergency management. A case study of the hospital medical care application shows the effectiveness of FEAC

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Preparing for GDPR:helping EU SMEs to manage data breaches

Over the last decade, the number of small and medium (SME) businesses suffering data breaches has risen at an alarming rate. Knowing how to respond to inevitable data breaches is critically important. A number of guidelines exist to advise organisations on the steps necessary to ensure an effective incident response. These guidelines tend to be unsuitable for SMEs, who generally have limited resources to expend on security and incident responses. Qualitative interviews were conducted with SMEs to probe current data breach response practice and to gather best-practice advice from SMEs themselves. The interviews revealed no widespread de facto approach, with a variety of practices being reported. A number of prevalent unhelpful-practice themes emerged from the responses, which we propose specific mitigation techniques to address. We therefore propose a SME-specific incident response framework that is simple yet powerful enough to inform and guide SME responses to data breach incidents