Building an Emulation Environment for Cyber Security Analyses of Complex Networked Systems

Computer networks are undergoing a phenomenal growth, driven by the rapidly increasing number of nodes constituting the networks. At the same time, the number of security threats on Internet and intranet networks is constantly growing, and the testing and experimentation of cyber defense solutions requires the availability of separate, test environments that best emulate the complexity of a real system. Such environments support the deployment and monitoring of complex mission-driven network scenarios, thus enabling the study of cyber defense strategies under real and controllable traffic and attack scenarios. In this paper, we propose a methodology that makes use of a combination of techniques of network and security assessment, and the use of cloud technologies to build an emulation environment with adjustable degree of affinity with respect to actual reference networks or planned systems. As a byproduct, starting from a specific study case, we collected a dataset consisting of complete network traces comprising benign and malicious traffic, which is feature-rich and publicly available

The Almirall Project: a portal of 19 th century culture and thinking

The Ateneu Barcelonès is a civil, private cultural association that has been a part of Spanish society and culture since 1860, having been founded with the aim of promoting dialogue and disseminating knowledge about the country's artistic, historical and intellectual heritage. Since 2005, been taking part in various digitisation projects, including several digital projects. The Almirall Project aims to be a portal that explains, contextualises and inter-relates 19th-century works, thinkers, artists and schools of thought at Barcelona's Ateneu Library, providing access to digital copies lodged at other portals

KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology for Negotiating Agent Development

Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of: (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardised components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, since these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents(especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system

The Information-Flow Approach to Ontology-Based Semantic Integration

In this article we argue for the lack of formal foundations for ontology-based semantic alignment. We analyse and formalise the basic notions of semantic matching and alignment and we situate them in the context of ontology-based alignment in open-ended and distributed environments, like the Web. We then use the mathematical notion of information flow in a distributed system to ground three hypotheses that enable semantic alignment. We draw our exemplar applications of this work from a variety of interoperability scenarios including ontology mapping, theory of semantic interoperability, progressive ontology alignment, and situated semantic alignment

The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges

Embedding agents in business applications using enterprise integration patterns

This paper addresses the issue of integrating agents with a variety of external resources and services, as found in enterprise computing environments. We propose an approach for interfacing agents and existing message routing and mediation engines based on the endpoint concept from the enterprise integration patterns of Hohpe and Woolf. A design for agent endpoints is presented, and an architecture for connecting the Jason agent platform to the Apache Camel enterprise integration framework using this type of endpoint is described. The approach is illustrated by means of a business process use case, and a number of Camel routes are presented. These demonstrate the benefits of interfacing agents to external services via a specialised message routing tool that supports enterprise integration patterns

A survey of agent-oriented methodologies

This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusses what approaches have been followed (mainly extending existing object oriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey

Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

The manufacturing industry faces many challenges such as reducing time-to-market and cutting costs. In order to meet these increasing demands, effective methods are need to support the early product development stages by bridging the gap of communicating early design ideas and the evaluation of manufacturing performance. This paper introduces methods of linking design and manufacturing domains using disparate technologies. The combined technologies include knowledge management supporting for product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, aggregate process planning systems, workflow management and data exchange formats. A case study has been used to demonstrate the use of these technologies, illustrated by adding manufacturing knowledge to generate alternative early process plan which are in turn used by an ERP system to obtain and optimise a rough-cut capacity plan