DCDIDP: A distributed, collaborative, and data-driven intrusion detection and prevention framework for cloud computing environments

With the growing popularity of cloud computing, the exploitation of possible vulnerabilities grows at the same pace; the distributed nature of the cloud makes it an attractive target for potential intruders. Despite security issues delaying its adoption, cloud computing has already become an unstoppable force; thus, security mechanisms to ensure its secure adoption are an immediate need. Here, we focus on intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSs) to defend against the intruders. In this paper, we propose a Distributed, Collaborative, and Data-driven Intrusion Detection and Prevention system (DCDIDP). Its goal is to make use of the resources in the cloud and provide a holistic IDPS for all cloud service providers which collaborate with other peers in a distributed manner at different architectural levels to respond to attacks. We present the DCDIDP framework, whose infrastructure level is composed of three logical layers: network, host, and global as well as platform and software levels. Then, we review its components and discuss some existing approaches to be used for the modules in our proposed framework. Furthermore, we discuss developing a comprehensive trust management framework to support the establishment and evolution of trust among different cloud service providers. © 2011 ICST

Adaptive and Resilient Revenue Maximizing Dynamic Resource Allocation and Pricing for Cloud-Enabled IoT Systems

Cloud computing is becoming an essential component of modern computer and communication systems. The available resources at the cloud such as computing nodes, storage, databases, etc. are often packaged in the form of virtual machines (VMs) to be used by remotely located client applications for computational tasks. However, the cloud has a limited number of VMs available, which have to be efficiently utilized to generate higher productivity and subsequently generate maximum revenue. Client applications generate requests with computational tasks at random times with random complexity to be processed by the cloud. The cloud service provider (CSP) has to decide whether to allocate a VM to a task at hand or to wait for a higher complexity task in the future. We propose a threshold-based mechanism to optimally decide the allocation and pricing of VMs to sequentially arriving requests in order to maximize the revenue of the CSP over a finite time horizon. Moreover, we develop an adaptive and resilient framework based that can counter the effect of realtime changes in the number of available VMs at the cloud server, the frequency and nature of arriving tasks on the revenue of the CSP.Comment: American Control Conference (ACC 2018

Distributed Hybrid Simulation of the Internet of Things and Smart Territories

This paper deals with the use of hybrid simulation to build and compose heterogeneous simulation scenarios that can be proficiently exploited to model and represent the Internet of Things (IoT). Hybrid simulation is a methodology that combines multiple modalities of modeling/simulation. Complex scenarios are decomposed into simpler ones, each one being simulated through a specific simulation strategy. All these simulation building blocks are then synchronized and coordinated. This simulation methodology is an ideal one to represent IoT setups, which are usually very demanding, due to the heterogeneity of possible scenarios arising from the massive deployment of an enormous amount of sensors and devices. We present a use case concerned with the distributed simulation of smart territories, a novel view of decentralized geographical spaces that, thanks to the use of IoT, builds ICT services to manage resources in a way that is sustainable and not harmful to the environment. Three different simulation models are combined together, namely, an adaptive agent-based parallel and distributed simulator, an OMNeT++ based discrete event simulator and a script-language simulator based on MATLAB. Results from a performance analysis confirm the viability of using hybrid simulation to model complex IoT scenarios.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1605.0487

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

NoTube – making TV a medium for personalized interaction

In this paper, we introduce NoTube’s vision on deploying semantics in interactive TV context in order to contextualize distributed applications and lift them to a new level of service that provides context-dependent and personalized selection of TV content. Additionally, lifting content consumption from a single-user activity to a community-based experience in a connected multi-device environment is central to the project. Main research questions relate to (1) data integration and enrichment - how to achieve unified and simple access to dynamic, growing and distributed multimedia content of diverse formats? (2) user and context modeling - what is an appropriate framework for context modeling, incorporating task-, domain and device-specific viewpoints? (3) context-aware discovery of resources - how could rather fuzzy matchmaking between potentially infinite contexts and available media resources be achieved? (4) collaborative architecture for TV content personalization - how can the combined information about data, context and user be put at disposal of both content providers and end-users in the view of creating extremely personalized services under controlled privacy and security policies? Thus, with the grand challenge in mind - to put the TV viewer back in the driver's seat – we focus on TV content as a medium for personalized interaction between people based on a service architecture that caters for a variety of content metadata, delivery channels and rendering devices

Future wireless applications for a networked city: services for visitors and residents

Future wireless networks will offer near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth communications to mobile users. In addition, the accurate position of users will be known, either through network services or via additional sensing devices such as GPS. These characteristics of future mobile environments will enable the development of location-aware and, more generally, context-sensitive applications. In an attempt to explore the system, application, and user issues associated with the development and deployment of such applications, we began to develop the Lancaster GUIDE system in early 1997, finishing the first phase of the project in 1999. In its entirety, GUIDE comprises a citywide wireless network based on 802.11, a context-sensitive tour guide application with, crucially, significant content, and a set of supporting distributed systems services. Uniquely in the field, GUIDE has been evaluated using members of the general public, and we have gained significant experience in the design of usable context-sensitive applications. We focus on the applications and supporting infrastructure that will form part of GUIDE II, the successor to the GUIDE system. These developments are designed to expand GUIDE outside the tour guide domain, and to provide applications and services for residents of the city of Lancaster, offering a vision of the future mobile environments that will emerge once ubiquitous high-bandwidth coverage is available in most cities

CyberGuarder: a virtualization security assurance architecture for green cloud computing

Cloud Computing, Green Computing, Virtualization, Virtual Security Appliance, Security Isolation

Computational intelligence approaches to robotics, automation, and control [Volume guest editors]

No abstract available