Comprehensive Security Framework for Global Threats Analysis

Cyber criminality activities are changing and becoming more and more professional. With the growth of financial flows through the Internet and the Information System (IS), new kinds of thread arise involving complex scenarios spread within multiple IS components. The IS information modeling and Behavioral Analysis are becoming new solutions to normalize the IS information and counter these new threads. This paper presents a framework which details the principal and necessary steps for monitoring an IS. We present the architecture of the framework, i.e. an ontology of activities carried out within an IS to model security information and User Behavioral analysis. The results of the performed experiments on real data show that the modeling is effective to reduce the amount of events by 91%. The User Behavioral Analysis on uniform modeled data is also effective, detecting more than 80% of legitimate actions of attack scenarios

Ontology acquisition and exchange of evolutionary product-brokering agents

Agent-based electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been booming with the development of the Internet and agent technologies. However, little effort has been devoted to exploring the learning and evolving capabilities of software agents. This paper addresses issues of evolving software agents in e-commerce applications. An agent structure with evolution features is proposed with a focus on internal hierarchical knowledge. We argue that knowledge base of agents should be the cornerstone for their evolution capabilities, and agents can enhance their knowledge bases by exchanging knowledge with other agents. In this paper, product ontology is chosen as an instance of knowledge base. We propose a new approach to facilitate ontology exchange among e-commerce agents. The ontology exchange model and its formalities are elaborated. Product-brokering agents have been designed and implemented, which accomplish the ontology exchange process from request to integration

A commentary on standardization in the Semantic Web, Common Logic and MultiAgent Systems

Given the ubiquity of the Web, the Semantic Web (SW) offers MultiAgent Systems (MAS) a most wide-ranging platform by which they could intercommunicate. It can be argued however that MAS require levels of logic that the current Semantic Web has yet to provide. As ISO Common Logic (CL) ISO/IEC IS 24707:2007 provides a firstorder logic capability for MAS in an interoperable way, it seems natural to investigate how CL may itself integrate with the SW thus providing a more expressive means by which MAS can interoperate effectively across the SW. A commentary is accordingly presented on how this may be achieved. Whilst it notes that certain limitations remain to be addressed, the commentary proposes that standardising the SW with CL provides the vehicle by which MAS can achieve their potential.</p

Ensuring Cyber-Security in Smart Railway Surveillance with SHIELD

Modern railways feature increasingly complex embedded computing systems for surveillance, that are moving towards fully wireless smart-sensors. Those systems are aimed at monitoring system status from a physical-security viewpoint, in order to detect intrusions and other environmental anomalies. However, the same systems used for physical-security surveillance are vulnerable to cyber-security threats, since they feature distributed hardware and software architectures often interconnected by ‘open networks’, like wireless channels and the Internet. In this paper, we show how the integrated approach to Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in embedded systems provided by the SHIELD framework (developed within the EU funded pSHIELD and nSHIELD research projects) can be applied to railway surveillance systems in order to measure and improve their SPD level. SHIELD implements a layered architecture (node, network, middleware and overlay) and orchestrates SPD mechanisms based on ontology models, appropriate metrics and composability. The results of prototypical application to a real-world demonstrator show the effectiveness of SHIELD and justify its practical applicability in industrial settings

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

OWL-POLAR : A Framework for Semantic Policy Representation and Reasoning

Peer reviewedPreprin

A multi-INT semantic reasoning framework for intelligence analysis support

Lockheed Martin Corp. has funded research to generate a framework and methodology for developing semantic reasoning applications to support the discipline oflntelligence Analysis. This chapter outlines that framework, discusses how it may be used to advance the information sharing and integrated analytic needs of the Intelligence Community, and suggests a system I software architecture for such applications

Integrating an agent-based wireless sensor network within an existing multi-agent condition monitoring system

The use of wireless sensor networks for condition monitoring is gaining ground across all sectors of industry, and while their use for power engineering applications has yet been limited, they represent a viable platform for next-generation substation condition monitoring systems. For engineers to fully benefit from this new approach to condition monitoring, new sensor data must be incorporated into a single integrated system. This paper proposes the integration of an agent-based wireless sensor network with an existing agent-based condition monitoring system. It demonstrates that multi-agent systems can be extended down to the sensor level while considering the reduced energy availability of low-power embedded devices. A novel agent-based approach to data translation is presented, which is demonstrated through two case studies: a lab-based temperature and vibration monitoring system, and a proposal to integrate a wireless sensor network to an existing technology demonstrator deployed in a substation in the UK