Viewpoint | Personal Data and the Internet of Things: It is time to care about digital provenance

The Internet of Things promises a connected environment reacting to and addressing our every need, but based on the assumption that all of our movements and words can be recorded and analysed to achieve this end. Ubiquitous surveillance is also a precondition for most dystopian societies, both real and fictional. How our personal data is processed and consumed in an ever more connected world must imperatively be made transparent, and more effective technical solutions than those currently on offer, to manage personal data must urgently be investigated.Comment: 3 pages, 0 figures, preprint for Communication of the AC

Autonomic computing architecture for SCADA cyber security

Cognitive computing relates to intelligent computing platforms that are based on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies. These technologies can be used to design systems that mimic the human brain to learn about their environment and can autonomously predict an impending anomalous situation. IBM first used the term ‘Autonomic Computing’ in 2001 to combat the looming complexity crisis (Ganek and Corbi, 2003). The concept has been inspired by the human biological autonomic system. An autonomic system is self-healing, self-regulating, self-optimising and self-protecting (Ganek and Corbi, 2003). Therefore, the system should be able to protect itself against both malicious attacks and unintended mistakes by the operator

Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Collaborative Intrusion Detection in Federated Cloud Environments

Moving services to the Cloud is a trend that has steadily gained popularity over recent years, with a constant increase in sophistication and complexity of such services. Today, critical infrastructure operators are considering moving their services and data to the Cloud. Infrastructure vendors will inevitably take advantage of the benefits Cloud Computing has to offer. As Cloud Computing grows in popularity, new models are deployed to exploit even further its full capacity, one of which is the deployment of Cloud federations. A Cloud federation is an association among different Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) with the goal of sharing resources and data. In providing a larger-scale and higher performance infrastructure, federation enables on-demand provisioning of complex services. In this paper we convey our contribution to this area by outlining our proposed methodology that develops a robust collaborative intrusion detection methodology in a federated Cloud environment. For collaborative intrusion detection we use the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to fuse the beliefs provided by the monitoring entities, taking the final decision regarding a possible attack. Protecting the federated Cloud against cyber attacks is a vital concern, due to the potential for significant economic consequences

A Costing Framework for the Dynamic Computational Efficiency of the Network Security Detection Function

This study developed a comprehensive framework to systematically evaluate the economic implications of security policy implementation in IT-centric business processes. Focusing on the detection aspect of the NIST cybersecurity framework, the research explored the interrelation between business operations, computational efficiency, and security protocols. The framework comprises nine components, addressing the gap between cost projections and security policy enforcement. The insights provided valuable perspectives on managing security expenses and resource allocation in information security, ensuring alignment with revenue and expenditure outcomes while emphasizing the need for a comprehensive approach to cost management in information security management