Towards Data Sharing across Decentralized and Federated IoT Data Analytics Platforms

In the past decade the Internet-of-Things concept has overwhelmingly entered all of the fields where data are produced and processed, thus, resulting in a plethora of IoT platforms, typically cloud-based, that centralize data and services management. In this scenario, the development of IoT services in domains such as smart cities, smart industry, e-health, automotive, are possible only for the owner of the IoT deployments or for ad-hoc business one-to-one collaboration agreements. The realization of "smarter" IoT services or even services that are not viable today envisions a complete data sharing with the usage of multiple data sources from multiple parties and the interconnection with other IoT services. In this context, this work studies several aspects of data sharing focusing on Internet-of-Things. We work towards the hyperconnection of IoT services to analyze data that goes beyond the boundaries of a single IoT system. This thesis presents a data analytics platform that: i) treats data analytics processes as services and decouples their management from the data analytics development; ii) decentralizes the data management and the execution of data analytics services between fog, edge and cloud; iii) federates peers of data analytics platforms managed by multiple parties allowing the design to scale into federation of federations; iv) encompasses intelligent handling of security and data usage control across the federation of decentralized platforms instances to reduce data and service management complexity. The proposed solution is experimentally evaluated in terms of performances and validated against use cases. Further, this work adopts and extends available standards and open sources, after an analysis of their capabilities, fostering an easier acceptance of the proposed framework. We also report efforts to initiate an IoT services ecosystem among 27 cities in Europe and Korea based on a novel methodology. We believe that this thesis open a viable path towards a hyperconnection of IoT data and services, minimizing the human effort to manage it, but leaving the full control of the data and service management to the users' will

Using container-based virtualization on web apps production environment: dipcode development cycle

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia InformáticaWith the fast evolution of the internet over the last years, the top priority on software development has shifted from what? to when?. Reduced time-to-market is now the competitive edge that all companies strive for. The usage of container-based virtualization technologies keep the multiple environments where a development team works similar enough, that their work is made easier when devel oping and testing new features, which in turn results in a significantly faster delivery. The nature of this tecnhology also brings numerous advantages when it comes to management, monitoring and maintaining resources, allowing for an ease of adjustment, based on the client needs. Throughout this dissertation is presented an extended base of knowledge about container technologies, especially Docker, as well as what are the basic techniques to use when building an application inside such infrastructure, from the writing of the Dockerfile to the adaptation of the multiple pipelines responsible to deploy the application.Com a rápida evolução da internet nos últimos anos, a prioridade máxima no desenvolvi-mento de software transformou-se de "o quê?" para "quando?". Disponibilizar rapidamente uma aplicação no mercado é agora a vantagem competitiva que todas as empresas ambi-cionam ter. A utilização de tecnologias de virtualização através de containers uniformizam os vários ambientes em que a equipa de desenvolvimento opera, facilitando assim o seu trabalho no que diz respeito à adição e teste de novas funcionalidades, o que resulta numa entrega significativamente mais rápida. A natureza desta tecnologia trás inúmeras vantagens à gestão, monitorização e manutenção de recursos, permitindo facilmente aumentar ou reduzir os mesmos baseado nas necessidades dos seus clientes. Nesta dissertação é apresentada uma extensa base de conhecimento sobre as tecnologias de containerização, em especial o Docker, bem como quais as técnicas base a utilizar quando se pretende construir uma aplicação com uma infraestrutura deste tipo, desde a escrita do Dockerfile, até à adaptação das várias pipelines responsáveis por disponibilizar a aplicação em ambiente de produção

Qualité de service dans l'IOT : couche de brouillard

Abstract : The Internet of Things (IoT) can be defined as a combination of push and pull from the technological side and human side respectively. This push and pull effect results in more connectivity among objects and humans in the near surrounding environments [1]. With the growth in the field of IoT, in recent times, the risk of real time failures has increased as well. The failures are often detected by certain points of vulnerability in the system. Narrowing down to the root causes we get the point of failures and that leads to the required measures to overcome them. This creates the need for IoT systems to have a proper Quality of Service (QoS) architecture. Thus, QoS is becoming a crucial issue with the democratization of IoT. QoS is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. In this study, we propose the methods of enforcement of QoS in IoT platforms. We will highlight the challenges and recurrent issues faced by all IoT platforms which in turn inspired us to build a generic tool to overcome these challenges by enforcing the QoS in all the IoT platforms with an easy to use set up. The main focus of this study is to enable QoS features in the Fog layer of the IoT architecture. Existing platforms and systems enabling QoS features in the Fog layer are also highlighted. Finally, we validate our proposed model by implementing it on our AMI-LAB platform.L'Internet des objets (IdO) (Internet of Things en anglais), peut être défini comme une combinaison d’interactions entre les Humains et le monde technologique de l’Internet. De cet effet résulte une interconnexion entre les objets physiques et les appareils technologiques dans leur environnement proche. Ces dernières années le domaine de l'IdO s’est beaucoup développé, entrainant ainsi une augmentation du risque de défaillances en temps réel. Les défaillances sont souvent détectées par certains points de vulnérabilité dans le système. En se concentrant sur les causes profondes, le point de défaillance peut être détecter, ce qui conduit aux mesures à mettre en place pour surmonter les défaillances. Les systèmes IdO ont donc besoin d'avoir une architecture de Qualité de Service (QdS) adéquate. Ainsi, la QdS devient un enjeu crucial avec la démocratisation de l'IdO. La QdS est la description ou la mesure de la performance globale d'un service, tel qu'un réseau de téléphonie ou informatique, ou un service de cloud computing, en particulier la performance perçue par les utilisateurs du réseau. Dans cette étude, nous proposons les méthodes de mise en œuvre de la QdS dans les plateformes IdO. Nous mettrons en lumière les défis et les problèmes récurrents rencontrés par toutes les plateformes IdO, qui nous ont inspirés à construire un outil générique pour surmonter ces défis en imposant la QdS dans toutes les plateformes IdO avec une configuration facile à utiliser. L'objectif principal de cette étude est de permettre les fonctionnalités de QdS dans la couche Fog de l'architecture IdO. Les plateformes et systèmes existants permettant les fonctionnalités de QdS dans la couche Fog sont également mis en évidence. Enfin, nous soulignons la validation de notre modèle en le mettant en œuvre sur notre plateforme AMI-LAB

European Language Grid

This open access book provides an in-depth description of the EU project European Language Grid (ELG). Its motivation lies in the fact that Europe is a multilingual society with 24 official European Union Member State languages and dozens of additional languages including regional and minority languages. The only meaningful way to enable multilingualism and to benefit from this rich linguistic heritage is through Language Technologies (LT) including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Speech Technologies and language-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The European Language Grid provides a single umbrella platform for the European LT community, including research and industry, effectively functioning as a virtual home, marketplace, showroom, and deployment centre for all services, tools, resources, products and organisations active in the field. Today the ELG cloud platform already offers access to more than 13,000 language processing tools and language resources. It enables all stakeholders to deposit, upload and deploy their technologies and datasets. The platform also supports the long-term objective of establishing digital language equality in Europe by 2030 – to create a situation in which all European languages enjoy equal technological support. This is the very first book dedicated to Language Technology and NLP platforms. Cloud technology has only recently matured enough to make the development of a platform like ELG feasible on a larger scale. The book comprehensively describes the results of the ELG project. Following an introduction, the content is divided into four main parts: (I) ELG Cloud Platform; (II) ELG Inventory of Technologies and Resources; (III) ELG Community and Initiative; and (IV) ELG Open Calls and Pilot Projects

Integrating Blockchain and Fog Computing Technologies for Efficient Privacy-preserving Systems

This PhD dissertation concludes a three-year long research journey on the integration of Fog Computing and Blockchain technologies. The main aim of such integration is to address the challenges of each of these technologies, by integrating it with the other. Blockchain technology (BC) is a distributed ledger technology in the form of a distributed transactional database, secured by cryptography, and governed by a consensus mechanism. It was initially proposed for decentralized cryptocurrency applications with practically proven high robustness. Fog Computing (FC) is a geographically distributed computing architecture, in which various heterogeneous devices at the edge of network are ubiquitously connected to collaboratively provide elastic computation services. FC provides enhanced services closer to end-users in terms of time, energy, and network load. The integration of FC with BC can result in more efficient services, in terms of latency and privacy, mostly required by Internet of Things systems

European Language Grid

This open access book provides an in-depth description of the EU project European Language Grid (ELG). Its motivation lies in the fact that Europe is a multilingual society with 24 official European Union Member State languages and dozens of additional languages including regional and minority languages. The only meaningful way to enable multilingualism and to benefit from this rich linguistic heritage is through Language Technologies (LT) including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Speech Technologies and language-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The European Language Grid provides a single umbrella platform for the European LT community, including research and industry, effectively functioning as a virtual home, marketplace, showroom, and deployment centre for all services, tools, resources, products and organisations active in the field. Today the ELG cloud platform already offers access to more than 13,000 language processing tools and language resources. It enables all stakeholders to deposit, upload and deploy their technologies and datasets. The platform also supports the long-term objective of establishing digital language equality in Europe by 2030 – to create a situation in which all European languages enjoy equal technological support. This is the very first book dedicated to Language Technology and NLP platforms. Cloud technology has only recently matured enough to make the development of a platform like ELG feasible on a larger scale. The book comprehensively describes the results of the ELG project. Following an introduction, the content is divided into four main parts: (I) ELG Cloud Platform; (II) ELG Inventory of Technologies and Resources; (III) ELG Community and Initiative; and (IV) ELG Open Calls and Pilot Projects

TORKAMELEON. IMPROVING TOR’S CENSORSHIP RESISTANCE WITH K-ANONYMIZATION MEDIA MORPHING COVERT INPUT CHANNELS

Anonymity networks such as Tor and other related tools are powerful means of increas- ing the anonymity and privacy of Internet users’ communications. Tor is currently the most widely used solution by whistleblowers to disclose confidential information and denounce censorship measures, including violations of civil rights, freedom of expres- sion, or guarantees of free access to information. However, recent research studies have shown that Tor is vulnerable to so-called powerful correlation attacks carried out by global adversaries or collaborative Internet censorship parties. In the Tor ”arms race” scenario, we can see that as new censorship, surveillance, and deep correlation tools have been researched, new, improved solutions for preserving anonymity have also emerged. In recent research proposals, unobservable encapsulation of IP packets in covert media channels is one of the most promising defenses against such threat models. They leverage WebRTC-based covert channels as a robust and practical approach against powerful traf- fic correlation analysis. At the same time, these solutions are difficult to combat through the traffic-blocking measures commonly used by censorship authorities. In this dissertation, we propose TorKameleon, a censorship evasion solution de- signed to protect Tor users with increased censorship resistance against powerful traffic correlation attacks executed by global adversaries. The system is based on flexible K- anonymization input circuits that can support TLS tunneling and WebRTC-based covert channels before forwarding users’ original input traffic to the Tor network. Our goal is to protect users from machine and deep learning correlation attacks between incom- ing user traffic and observed traffic at different Tor network relays, such as middle and egress relays. TorKameleon is the first system to implement a Tor pluggable transport based on parameterizable TLS tunneling and WebRTC-based covert channels. We have implemented the TorKameleon prototype and performed extensive validations to ob- serve the correctness and experimental performance of the proposed solution in the Tor environment. With these evaluations, we analyze the necessary tradeoffs between the performance of the standard Tor network and the achieved effectiveness and performance of TorKameleon, capable of preserving the required unobservability properties.Redes de anonimização como o Tor e soluções ou ferramentas semelhantes são meios poderosos de aumentar a anonimidade e a privacidade das comunicações de utilizadores da Internet . O Tor é atualmente a rede de anonimato mais utilizada por delatores para divulgar informações confidenciais e denunciar medidas de censura tais como violações de direitos civis e da liberdade de expressão, ou falhas nas garantias de livre acesso à informação. No entanto, estudos recentes mostram que o Tor é vulnerável a adversários globais ou a entidades que colaboram entre si para garantir a censura online. Neste cenário competitivo e de jogo do “gato e do rato”, é possível verificar que à medida que novas soluções de censura e vigilância são investigadas, novos sistemas melhorados para a preservação de anonimato são também apresentados e refinados. O encapsulamento de pacotes IP em túneis encapsulados em protocolos de media são uma das mais promissoras soluções contra os novos modelos de ataque à anonimidade. Estas soluções alavancam canais encobertos em protocolos de media baseados em WebRTC para resistir a poderosos ataques de correlação de tráfego e a medidas de bloqueios normalmente usadas pelos censores. Nesta dissertação propomos o TorKameleon, uma solução desenhada para protoger os utilizadores da rede Tor contra os mais recentes ataques de correlação feitos por um modelo de adversário global. O sistema é baseado em estratégias de anonimização e reencaminhamento do tráfego do utilizador através de K nós, utilizando também encap- sulamento do tráfego em canais encobertos em túneis TLS ou WebRTC. O nosso objetivo é proteger os utilizadores da rede Tor de ataques de correlação implementados através de modelos de aprendizagem automática feitos entre o tráfego do utilizador que entra na rede Tor e esse mesmo tráfego noutro segmento da rede, como por exemplo nos nós de saída da rede. O TorKameleon é o primeiro sistema a implementar um Tor pluggable transport parametrizável, baseado em túneis TLS ou em canais encobertos em protocolos media. Implementamos um protótipo do sistema e realizamos uma extensa avalição expe- rimental, inserindo a solução no ambiente da rede Tor. Com base nestas avaliações, anali- zamos o tradeoff necessário entre a performance da rede Tor e a eficácia e a performance obtida do TorKameleon, que garante as propriedades de preservação de anonimato