Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Migration of an On-Premise Single-Tenant Enterprise Application to the Azure Cloud: The Multi-Tenancy Case Study

Kokkuvõte Pilvearvutuse edu muudab radikaalselt tavasid kuidas edaspidi infotehnoloogia teenuseid arendatakse, juurutatakse ja hallatakse. Sellest tulenevalt on sõnakõlks „pilve migratsioon“ vägagi aktuaalne paljudes ettevõtetes. Tänu sellele tehnoloogiale on paljud suured ja väikesed ettevõtted huvitatud enda tarkvara, andmebaasi süsteemide ja infrastruktuuri üleviimisest pilve keskkonda. Olemasolevate süsteemide migreerimine pilve võib vähendada kulutusi, mis on seotud vajamineva riistvara, tarkvara paigaldamise ning litsentseerimisega ja samuti selle kõige haldamiseks vajaminevate inimeste palkamisega. Rakenduse ja selle andmete hoidmine pilves, mis teenindab mitmeid üürnike (ik. tenants) võib osutuda kalliks kui ei kasutada jagatud lähenemist üürnike vahel. Sellest tulenevalt on teadlikult disainitud rakenduse ning andme arhitektuur äärmiselt oluline organisatsioonile, mis kasutab mitme-üürniku (ik. multi-tenant) lähenemist. Käesolevas magistritöös kirjeldatakse juhtumiuuringut (ik. case study) ning saadud kogemusi eraldiseiseva majasiseselt paigaldatava rakenduse migreerimisel Azure pilve keskkonda. Töö kirjeldab juristidele mõeldud tootlikkuse mõõtmise tarkvara andmekihi migreerimist Azure pilvekeskkonda. Majasisese ühe tarbijaga tarkvara andmekihi üleviimine efektiivsele mitme-üürniku andmekandja süsteemi pilve keskkonnas nõuab lisaks ka kõrgetasemelise autentimis-mehhanismi disainimist ning realiseerimist. Töö põhirõhk on turvalise skaleeruva ning mitme-üürniku efektiivse andmekandja süsteemi arhitektuuri disainimine ning realiseerimine pilve-keskkonda. Projektis kasutatakse SQL Database’i (endine SQL Azure) poolt pakutavat sisse ehitatud võimekust (SQL Federations) selleks, et tagada turvaline andmete eraldatus erinevate üürnike vahel ja andmebaasi skaleeruvus. Tarkvara andmekihi migreerimine pilve keskkonda toob kaasa kulude vähenemis, mis on seotud tarkvara tarnimisega, paigaldamise ning haldamisega. Lisaks aitab see ettevõttel laieneda uutele turgudele, mis enne migreerimist oli takistatud kohapeal teostava tarkvara paigaldamisega. Tänu pilves olevale andmekihile nõuab uuele kliendile süsteemi paigaldamine väga väikest kulutust.The success of cloud computing is changing the way how information technology services are developed, deployed, maintained and scaled. This makes the ‘migration to the cloud’ a buzzword in the industry for most of the enterprises today. Observing so many advantages of this phenomenon technology, enterprises from small to large scales are interested in migrating their software applications, database systems or infrastructures to cloud scale solutions. Migrating existing systems to a cloud scale solution can reduce the expenses related to costs of the necessary hardware for servers, installation of the operating system environment, license costs of the operating system and database products, deployment of the database products and hiring professional staff for keeping the system up and running. However, storing the application data to a back-end that serves multiple tenants on the cloud will be also costly if the resources on the cloud platform are not shared fairly among tenants. Thus, a carefully designed multi-tenant architecture is essential for an organization that serves multiple tenants. In this master thesis, we will describe a case study and lessons learned on the migration of an enterprise application from an on-premise deployment backend to the Azure Cloud. More specifically, the thesis describes the migration of a productivity tool specialized for legal professionals to a multi-tenant data storage back-ends on Azure Cloud. Moving an on-premise, single-tenant software backend to a multi-tenant data storage system on the cloud will also require design and implementation of authentication mechanisms. The core focus of the work consists of the design and implementation of a secure, scalable and multi-tenant efficient data storage system and application architecture on the cloud. SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure) offers native features (SQL Federations) for the secure isolation of the data among tenants and database scalability which has been used inside the project. Furthermore, the basic application authentication mechanism is enhanced with identity providers such as Google Account and Windows Live ID by embedding native functionality of Windows Azure called Azure Access Control Service to the login mechanism. Migration of the software backend to a cloud scale solution is expected to reduce the costs related to delivery, deployment, maintenance and operation of the software for the business. Furthermore, it will help the business to target new markets since it is a cloud based solution and requires very little initial effort to deliver the software to the new customers

A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing

Edge computing is promoted to meet increasing performance needs of data-driven services using computational and storage resources close to the end devices, at the edge of the current network. To achieve higher performance in this new paradigm one has to consider how to combine the efficiency of resource usage at all three layers of architecture: end devices, edge devices, and the cloud. While cloud capacity is elastically extendable, end devices and edge devices are to various degrees resource-constrained. Hence, an efficient resource management is essential to make edge computing a reality. In this work, we first present terminology and architectures to characterize current works within the field of edge computing. Then, we review a wide range of recent articles and categorize relevant aspects in terms of 4 perspectives: resource type, resource management objective, resource location, and resource use. This taxonomy and the ensuing analysis is used to identify some gaps in the existing research. Among several research gaps, we found that research is less prevalent on data, storage, and energy as a resource, and less extensive towards the estimation, discovery and sharing objectives. As for resource types, the most well-studied resources are computation and communication resources. Our analysis shows that resource management at the edge requires a deeper understanding of how methods applied at different levels and geared towards different resource types interact. Specifically, the impact of mobility and collaboration schemes requiring incentives are expected to be different in edge architectures compared to the classic cloud solutions. Finally, we find that fewer works are dedicated to the study of non-functional properties or to quantifying the footprint of resource management techniques, including edge-specific means of migrating data and services.Comment: Accepted in the Special Issue Mobile Edge Computing of the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing journa

Federated and autonomic management of multimedia services

Over the years, the Internet has significantly evolved in size and complexity. Additionally, the modern multimedia services it offers have considerably more stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements than traditional static services. These factors contribute to the ever-increasing complexity and cost to manage the Internet and its services. In the dissertation, a novel network management architecture is proposed to overcome these problems. It supports QoS-guarantees of multimedia services across the Internet, by setting up end-to-end network federations. A network federation is defined as a persistent cross-organizational agreement that enables the cooperating networks to share capabilities. Additionally, the architecture incorporates aspects from autonomic network management to tackle the ever-growing management complexity of modern communications networks. Specifically, a hierarchical approach is presented, which guarantees scalable collaboration of huge amounts of self-governing autonomic management components

Advancing IoT Platforms Interoperability

The IoT European Platforms Initiative (IoT-EPI) projects are addressing the topic of Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects and aim to deliver an IoT extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects that supports smart environments, businesses, services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configuration capabilities. The specific areas of focus of the research activities are architectures and semantic interoperability, which reliably cover multiple use cases. The goal is to deliver dynamically-configured infrastructure and integration platforms for connected smart objects covering multiple technologies and multiple intelligent artefacts. The IoT-EPI ecosystem has been created with the objective of increasing the impact of the IoT-related European research and innovation, including seven European promising projects on IoT platforms: AGILE, BIG IoT, INTER-IoT, VICINITY, SymbIoTe, bIoTope, and TagItSmart.This white paper provides an insight regarding interoperability in the IoT platforms and ecosystems created and used by IoT-EPI. The scope of this document covers the interoperability aspects, challenges and approaches that cope with interoperability in the current existing IoT platforms and presents some insights regarding the future of interoperability in this context. It presents possible solutions, and a possible IoT interoperability platform architecture

A Novel Blockchain-based Trust Model for Cloud Identity Management

Secure and reliable management of identities has become one of the greatest challenges facing cloud computing today, mainly due to the huge number of new cloud-based applications generated by this model, which means more user accounts, passwords, and personal information to provision, monitor, and secure. Currently, identity federation is the most useful solution to overcome the aforementioned issues and simplify the user experience by allowing efficient authentication mechanisms and use of identity information from data distributed across multiple domains. However, this approach creates considerable complexity in managing trust relationships for both the cloud service providers and their clients. Poor management of trust in federated identity management systems brings with it many security, privacy and interoperability issues, which contributes to the reluctance of organizations to move their critical identity data to the cloud. In this paper, we aim to address these issues by introducing a novel trust and identity management model based on the Blockchain for cloud identity management with security and privacy improvements

Federated identity architecture of the european eID system

Federated identity management is a method that facilitates management of identity processes and policies among the collaborating entities without a centralized control. Nowadays, there are many federated identity solutions, however, most of them covers different aspects of the identification problem, solving in some cases specific problems. Thus, none of these initiatives has consolidated as a unique solution and surely it will remain like that in a near future. To assist users choosing a possible solution, we analyze different federated identify approaches, showing main features, and making a comparative study among them. The former problem is even worst when multiple organizations or countries already have legacy eID systems, as it is the case of Europe. In this paper, we also present the European eID solution, a purely federated identity system that aims to serve almost 500 million people and that could be extended in midterm also to eID companies. The system is now being deployed at the EU level and we present the basic architecture and evaluate its performance and scalability, showing that the solution is feasible from the point of view of performance while keeping security constrains in mind. The results show a good performance of the solution in local, organizational, and remote environments