Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Technologies and Economic Investment Opportunities in the UK

This article reviews the role played by carbon and capture (CCS) technologies in order to facilitate the transition to low-carbon emitting technologies in the medium term. More precisely, we address the following central questions: how will the development of CCS technologies impact energy policies in order to yield to sustainable energy solutions? At what costs will pollution reductions be achieved? And most importantly, which CCS technologies will turn out to offer the most effective and efficient solution to handle the challenge of the increased demand for energy within the context of the climate change? We critically assess the technology readiness levels of various CCS technologies – post-combustion capture, pre-combustion capture, amine scrubbing, oxyfuel, integrated gasification combined cycle, calcium looping and chemical looping – based on the best available evidence to date.Carbon Capture and Storage; Technology Readiness; Climate Policy

Towards generic satellite payloads: software radio

Satellite payloads are becoming much more complex with the evolution towards multimedia applications. Moreover satellite lifetime increases while standard and services evolve faster, necessitating a hardware platform that can evolves for not developing new systems on each change. The same problem occurs in terrestrial systems like mobile networks and a foreseen solution is the software defined radio technology. In this paper we describe a way of introducing this concept at satellite level to offer to operators the required flexibility in the system. The digital functions enabling this technology, the hardware components implementing the functions and the reconfiguration processes are detailed. We show that elements of the software radio for satellites exist and that this concept is feasible

Resilience to DDoS attacks

Tese de mestrado, Segurança Informática, 2022, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasDistributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) is one of the most common cyberattack used by malicious actors. It has been evolving over the years, using more complex techniques to increase its attack power and surpass the current defense mechanisms. Due to the existent number of different DDoS attacks and their constant evolution, companies need to be constantly aware of developments in DDoS solutions Additionally, the existence of multiple solutions, also makes it hard for companies to decide which solution best suits the company needs and must be implemented. In order to help these companies, our work focuses in analyzing the existing DDoS solutions, for companies to implement solutions that can lead to the prevention, detection, mitigation, and tolerance of DDoS attacks, with the objective of improving the robustness and resilience of the companies against DDoS attacks. In our work, it is presented and described different DDoS solutions, some need to be purchased and other are open-source or freeware, however these last solutions require more technical expertise by cybersecurity agents. To understand how cybersecurity agents protect their companies against DDoS attacks, nowadays, it was built a questionnaire and sent to multiple cybersecurity agents from different countries and industries. As a result of the study performed about the different DDoS solutions and the information gathered from the questionnaire, it was possible to create a DDoS framework to guide companies in the decisionmaking process of which DDoS solutions best suits their resources and needs, in order to ensure that companies can develop their robustness and resilience to fight DDoS attacks. The proposed framework it is divided in three phases, in which the first and second phase is to understand the company context and the asset that need to be protected. The last phase is where we choose the DDoS solution based on the information gathered in the previous phases. We analyzed and presented for each DDoS solutions, which DDoS attack types they can prevent, detect and/or mitigate

Telephony Denial of Service Defense at Data Plane (TDoSD@DP)

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control protocol used to establish and terminate calls that are deployed globally. A flood of SIP INVITE packets sent by an attacker causes a Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) incident, during which legitimate users are unable to use telephony services. Legacy TDoS defense is typically implemented as network appliances and not sufficiently deployed to enable early detection. To make TDoS defense more widely deployed and yet affordable, this paper presents TDoSD@DP where TDoS detection and mitigation is programmed at the data plane so that it can be enabled on every switch port and therefore serves as distributed SIP sensors. With this approach, the damage is isolated at a particular switch and bandwidth saved by not sending attack packets further upstream. Experiments have been performed to track the SIP state machine and to limit the number of active SIP session per port. The results show that TDoSD@DP was able to detect and mitigate ongoing INVITE flood attack, protecting the SIP server, and limiting the damage to a local switch. Bringing the TDoS defense function to the data plane provides a novel data plane application that operates at the SIP protocol and a novel approach for TDoS defense implementation.Final Accepted Versio

Stellar: Network Attack Mitigation using Advanced Blackholing

© ACM 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies - CoNEXT ’18, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3281411.3281413.Network attacks, including Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), continuously increase in terms of bandwidth along with damage (recent attacks exceed 1.7 Tbps) and have a devastating impact on the targeted companies/governments. Over the years, mitigation techniques, ranging from blackholing to policy-based filtering at routers, and on to traffic scrubbing, have been added to the network operator’s toolbox. Even though these mitigation techniques pro- vide some protection, they either yield severe collateral damage, e.g., dropping legitimate traffic (blackholing), are cost-intensive, or do not scale well for Tbps level attacks (ACL filltering, traffic scrubbing), or require cooperation and sharing of resources (Flowspec). In this paper, we propose Advanced Blackholing and its system realization Stellar. Advanced blackholing builds upon the scalability of blackholing while limiting collateral damage by increasing its granularity. Moreover, Stellar reduces the required level of cooperation to enhance mitigation effectiveness. We show that fine-grained blackholing can be realized, e.g., at a major IXP, by combining available hardware filters with novel signaling mechanisms. We evaluate the scalability and performance of Stellar at a large IXP that interconnects more than 800 networks, exchanges more than 6 Tbps tra c, and witnesses many network attacks every day. Our results show that network attacks, e.g., DDoS amplification attacks, can be successfully mitigated while the networks and services under attack continue to operate untroubled.EC/H2020/679158/EU/Resolving the Tussle in the Internet: Mapping, Architecture, and Policy Making/ResolutioNetDFG, FE 570/4-1, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis 201

Analyse und Erweiterung eines fehler-toleranten NoC für SRAM-basierte FPGAs in Weltraumapplikationen

Data Processing Units for scientific space mission need to process ever higher volumes of data and perform ever complex calculations. But the performance of available space-qualified general purpose processors is just in the lower three digit megahertz range, which is already insufficient for some applications. As an alternative, suitable processing steps can be implemented in hardware on a space-qualified SRAM-based FPGA. However, suitable devices are susceptible against space radiation. At the Institute for Communication and Network Engineering a fault-tolerant, network-based communication architecture was developed, which enables the construction of processing chains on the basis of different processing modules within suitable SRAM-based FPGAs and allows the exchange of single processing modules during runtime, too. The communication architecture and its protocol shall isolate non SEU mitigated or just partial SEU mitigated modules affected by radiation-induced faults to prohibit the propagation of errors within the remaining System-on-Chip. In the context of an ESA study, this communication architecture was extended with further components and implemented in a representative hardware platform. Based on the acquired experiences during the study, this work analyses the actual fault-tolerance characteristics as well as weak points of this initial implementation. At appropriate locations, the communication architecture was extended with mechanisms for fault-detection and fault-differentiation as well as with a hardware-based monitoring solution. Both, the former measures and the extension of the employed hardware-platform with selective fault-injection capabilities for the emulation of radiation-induced faults within critical areas of a non SEU mitigated processing module, are used to evaluate the effects of radiation-induced faults within the communication architecture. By means of the gathered results, further measures to increase fast detection and isolation of faulty nodes are developed, selectively implemented and verified. In particular, the ability of the communication architecture to isolate network nodes without SEU mitigation could be significantly improved.Instrumentenrechner für wissenschaftliche Weltraummissionen müssen ein immer höheres Datenvolumen verarbeiten und immer komplexere Berechnungen ausführen. Die Performanz von verfügbaren qualifizierten Universalprozessoren liegt aber lediglich im unteren dreistelligen Megahertz-Bereich, was für einige Anwendungen bereits nicht mehr ausreicht. Als Alternative bietet sich die Implementierung von entsprechend geeigneten Datenverarbeitungsschritten in Hardware auf einem qualifizierten SRAM-basierten FPGA an. Geeignete Bausteine sind jedoch empfindlich gegenüber der Strahlungsumgebung im Weltraum. Am Institut für Datentechnik und Kommunikationsnetze wurde eine fehlertolerante netzwerk-basierte Kommunikationsarchitektur entwickelt, die innerhalb eines geeigneten SRAM-basierten FPGAs Datenverarbeitungsmodule miteinander nach Bedarf zu Verarbeitungsketten verbindet, sowie den Austausch von einzelnen Modulen im Betrieb ermöglicht. Nicht oder nur partiell SEU mitigierte Module sollen bei strahlungsbedingten Fehlern im Modul durch das Protokoll und die Fehlererkennungsmechanismen der Kommunikationsarchitektur isoliert werden, um ein Ausbreiten des Fehlers im restlichen System-on-Chip zu verhindern. Im Kontext einer ESA Studie wurde diese Kommunikationsarchitektur um Komponenten erweitert und auf einer repräsentativen Hardwareplattform umgesetzt. Basierend auf den gesammelten Erfahrungen aus der Studie, wird in dieser Arbeit eine Analyse der tatsächlichen Fehlertoleranz-Eigenschaften sowie der Schwachstellen dieser ursprünglichen Implementierung durchgeführt. Die Kommunikationsarchitektur wurde an geeigneten Stellen um Fehlerdetektierungs- und Fehlerunterscheidungsmöglichkeiten erweitert, sowie um eine hardwarebasierte Überwachung ergänzt. Sowohl diese Maßnahmen, als auch die Erweiterung der Hardwareplattform um gezielte Fehlerinjektions-Möglichkeiten zum Emulieren von strahlungsinduzierten Fehlern in kritischen Komponenten eines nicht SEU mitigierten Prozessierungsmoduls werden genutzt, um die tatsächlichen auftretenden Effekte in der Kommunikationsarchitektur zu evaluieren. Anhand der Ergebnisse werden weitere Verbesserungsmaßnahmen speziell zur schnellen Detektierung und Isolation von fehlerhaften Knoten erarbeitet, selektiv implementiert und verifiziert. Insbesondere die Fähigkeit, fehlerhafte, nicht SEU mitigierte Netzwerkknoten innerhalb der Kommunikationsarchitektur zu isolieren, konnte dabei deutlich verbessert werden

System integration of automated mine optimization system

Abstract: With the advancement and applications of technologies in mineral processing industry, an automated mine optimization system is developed to include the following functions: mine production optimizer; various dynamic crusher controllers; and a set of soft sensors. The system consists of a real-time engine to run optimizer, dynamic controllers and soft sensors. The real-time engine is integrated with process control systems at a mine, including mining dispatch system and geological data base through ODBC protocol, processing plant SCADA system and production reporting systems via OPC protocol. The system can potentially help increase production output up to 30% of a mine with mining and mineral processing operations, such as diamond mine, iron ore mine, chromite ore mine, manganese ore mine, coal mine, etc

Cost Effectiveness Analysis of the Emission Abatement in the Shipping Sector

Maritime transport is generally considered environmental friendly compared with other transportation means. Nevertheless, shipping emissions give an important contribution to the global anthropogenic pollution and are a significant source of damage to environment and human health. Contrary to land bases sources, few regulations exist and shipping emissions are expected to grow as a consequence of increasing transport volume. For this reason, both technological improvement and international legislation are urgently needed. This report summarizes the NOx SOx and CO2 abated technologies and provide an overview of the costs and benefits related to potential emissions reductions. Investigating the cost effectiveness of specific emission measure, this report provides important information for transport sustainability. However, to break the connection between maritime transport and environmental damage, stricter emission regulation and powerful economic instruments are also needed.JRC.H.4-Transport and air qualit

A new perspective at the ship-air-sea interface: the environmental impacts of exhaust gas scrubber discharge

Shipping emissions are likely to increase significantly in the coming decades, alongside increasing emphasis on the sustainability and environmental impacts of the maritime transport sector. Exhaust gas cleaning systems (“scrubbers”), using seawater or fresh water as cleaning media for sulfur dioxide, are progressively used by shipping companies to comply with emissions regulations. Little is known about the chemical composition of the scrubber effluent and its ecological consequences for marine life and biogeochemical processes. If scrubbers become a central tool for atmospheric pollution reduction from shipping, modeling, and experimental studies will be necessary to determine the ecological and biogeochemical effects of scrubber wash water discharge on the marine environment. Furthermore, attention must be paid to the regulation and enforcement of environmental protection standards concerning scrubber use. Close collaboration between natural scientists and social scientists is crucial for progress toward sustainable shipping and protection of the marine environment