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

A Hierarchical Agent-based Approach to Security in Smart Offices

As electronic devices become more and more pervasively integrated in our daily routine, security concerns start to become evident. In the last years, there has been an increasing interest on the topic of security in smart environments. One of the most challenging environments regarding security are smart offices due to the high number of potential users, devices and spaces, and the diversity of security roles. This paper presents a security solution for an agent-based architecture for the smart office. This security solution is potentially applicable to generic smart environments, but it suits particularly well to the smart office scenario, taking advantage of the particular characteristics of the environment to satisfy the security requirements. The result is a hierarchical, agent-based solution, flexible and scalable enough to be applicable to different smart office scenarios, from small businesses to large organizations

Last Mile Transfer: enabling local data transfers on the global WLCG infrastructure

The computing challenge at CERN is of a global nature. To make real world-wide distributed computing possible, more than 150 computer centers must be seamlessly integrated. This means integrating CPU, storage and network. The File Transfer Service (FTS) is a tool that emerges to solve the data movement problem. It is used to schedule data transfers between different storage resources. Its optimizer takes care of increasing the parallelism to improve throughput, without exhausting the storage resources. It also has a web interface (WebFTS) which makes it quite easy for users to invoke reliable, managed data transfers on distributed infrastructure. However, FTS only solves part of the problem, as an increasing number of grid users run simulations on their personal laptops, generating files that can amount to several gigabytes. Normally, users would want to move these files from their personal computers to a remote Grid storage for long-term archiving, sharing, or running further processing on them. The issue here is that these users might be sitting behind a firewall, which means that their computer will not be able to listen to inbound connections. Last Mile Transfer is a solution that was developed to enable local file uploads on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) infrastructure

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

A Framework for Sensor Networks with Multiple Owners

A framework for sensor networks with multiple owners develops a mechanism for assured and controlled access to sensor assets owned and maintained by disparate organizations. The framework addresses the limitations in an existing system and proposes extensions to it. It also provides new mechanisms for cross-domain authentication and authorization by implementing a prototype as a proof of concept