Semantic Support for Log Analysis of Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

Testing is a relevant activity for the development life-cycle of Safety Critical Embedded systems. In particular, much effort is spent for analysis and classification of test logs from SCADA subsystems, especially when failures occur. The human expertise is needful to understand the reasons of failures, for tracing back the errors, as well as to understand which requirements are affected by errors and which ones will be affected by eventual changes in the system design. Semantic techniques and full text search are used to support human experts for the analysis and classification of test logs, in order to speedup and improve the diagnosis phase. Moreover, retrieval of tests and requirements, which can be related to the current failure, is supported in order to allow the discovery of available alternatives and solutions for a better and faster investigation of the problem.Comment: EDCC-2014, BIG4CIP-2014, Embedded systems, testing, semantic discovery, ontology, big dat

Hybrid Simulation and Test of Vessel Traffic Systems on the Cloud

This paper presents a cloud-based hybrid simulation platform to test large-scale distributed System-of-Systems (SoS) for the management and control of maritime traffic, the so-called Vessel Traffic Systems (VTS). A VTS consists of multiple, heterogeneous, distributed and interoperating systems, including radar, automatic identification systems, direction finders, electro-optical sensors, gateways to external VTSs, information systems; identifying, representing and analyzing interactions is a challenge to the evaluation of the real risks for safety and security of the marine environment. The need for reproducing in fabric the system behaviors that could occur in situ demands for the ability of integrating emulated and simulated environments to cope with the different testability requirements of involved systems and to keep testing cost sustainable. The platform exploits hybrid simulation and virtualization technologies, and it is deployable on a private cloud, reducing the cost of setting up realistic and effective testing scenarios

Energy-oriented denial of service attacks: an emerging menace for large cloud infrastructures

This work analyzes a new and very subtle kind of security threat that can affect large-scale cloud-based IT service infrastructures, by exploiting the computational resources of their component data center to waste as much energy as possible. The consequence of these threats ranges from increased costs in the energy bill, to penalization for exceeding the agreed quantity of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, up to complete denial of service caused by electrical outages due to power budget exhaustion. We analyzed different types of such attacks with their potential impacts on the energy consumption, modeled their behavior and quantified how current energy-proportional technologies may provide attackers with great opportunities for raising the target facility emissions and costs. These efforts resulted in a simple model with some parametric reference values that can be used to estimate the impact of such attacks also in presence of very large infrastructures containing thousands or millions of servers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Il Futuro della Cybersecurity in Italia: Ambiti Progettuali Strategici

Il presente volume nasce come continuazione del precedente, con l’obiettivo di delineare un insieme di ambiti progettuali e di azioni che la comunità nazionale della ricerca ritiene essenziali a complemento e a supporto di quelli previsti nel DPCM Gentiloni in materia di sicurezza cibernetica, pubblicato nel febbraio del 2017. La lettura non richiede particolari conoscenze tecniche; il testo è fruibile da chiunque utilizzi strumenti informatici o navighi in rete. Nel volume vengono considerati molteplici aspetti della cybersecurity, che vanno dalla definizione di infrastrutture e centri necessari a organizzare la difesa alle azioni e alle tecnologie da sviluppare per essere protetti al meglio, dall’individuazione delle principali tecnologie da difendere alla proposta di un insieme di azioni orizzontali per la formazione, la sensibilizzazione e la gestione dei rischi. Gli ambiti progettuali e le azioni, che noi speriamo possano svilupparsi nei prossimi anni in Italia, sono poi accompagnate da una serie di raccomandazioni agli organi preposti per affrontare al meglio, e da Paese consapevole, la sfida della trasformazione digitale. Le raccomandazioni non intendono essere esaustive, ma vanno a toccare dei punti che riteniamo essenziali per una corretta implementazione di una politica di sicurezza cibernetica a livello nazionale. Politica che, per sua natura, dovrà necessariamente essere dinamica e in continua evoluzione in base ai cambiamenti tecnologici, normativi, sociali e geopolitici. All’interno del volume, sono riportati dei riquadri con sfondo violetto o grigio; i primi sono usati nel capitolo introduttivo e nelle conclusioni per mettere in evidenza alcuni concetti ritenuti importanti, i secondi sono usati negli altri capitoli per spiegare il significato di alcuni termini tecnici comunemente utilizzati dagli addetti ai lavori. In conclusione, ringraziamo tutti i colleghi che hanno contribuito a questo volume: un gruppo di oltre 120 ricercatori, provenienti da circa 40 tra Enti di Ricerca e Università, unico per numerosità ed eccellenza, che rappresenta il meglio della ricerca in Italia nel settore della cybersecurity. Un grazie speciale va a Gabriella Caramagno e ad Angela Miola che hanno contribuito a tutte le fasi di produzione del libro. Tra i ringraziamenti ci fa piacere aggiungere il supporto ottenuto dai partecipanti al progetto FILIERASICURA

Security and Resilience in Intelligent Data-Centric Systems and Communication Networks, 1st Edition,

Intelligent data-centric critical systems play a key role into several fundamental human activities. The consequences of an outage can be catastrophic in terms of efficiency, economical losses, and consumer dissatisfaction. In recent years, intelligent systems, complex and distributed have increasingly been used in scenarios, often critical, such as airports, seaports, plants for the provision of water and energy, and business transactional systems. Such systems have been used for interconnection, control, and management. They are in charge of providing support for advanced monitoring and control facilities. These systems from the point of view of security and resilience are of increasing importance in both industrial and corporate. They have to be highly resilient in order to reduce the risk of severe failures. The criticality of such system poses new challenges for computer engineer, which must develop systems to ensure a high level of protection, and at the same time, they must keep low costs and development time. The security and resilience of intelligent data-centric critical systems is hard to achieve for complexity of the system. First, they are designed as the composition of several Off-The-Shelf (OTS) items and/or legacy subsystems, primarily for their ability to reduce development costs. On the other hand, such components potentially introduce new vulnerabilities in the system. Second, their size has significantly grown, and their operational environment, originally planned to be "closed", becomes more and more "open" to allow interoperability and remote and mobile accesses and control. This implies malicious behaviors should be taken into account. On the other hand, such systems use and manage a huge amount of heterogeneous, complex and critical data (sensor data, IoT data, mobile data, monitoring data, forensics data), which can be target of potential threats. Therefore, the book will present current advances in the field, following both theoretical and practical results. Intelligent data-centric critical system development requires appropriate techniques, architectures and tools, having in view the advance of science in this area and the development of secure and resilient solutions. The book aims at disseminating of research efforts in the security and resilience of intelligent data-centric critical systems, in order to support advance research in this area. The Edited Book aims to present security and resilience aspects of current intelligent data-centric critical systems and communication networks, including techniques and tools to prevent and avoid accidental and malicious behaviors. The overall objectives of the book are explain state-of-the-art technological solutions for main issues hindering the development of monitoring and reaction solutions, supporting security and resilience of intelligent data-centric critical systems. In particular, strategies and technique to analysis and processing complex and sensitive data needed to malicious behaviors and attacks against such systems and communication networks are presented. The book aims at making readers familiar with those concepts and technologies that are successfully used in the implementation of more resilient and secure intelligent data-centric critical systems

CIPRNet training lecture: Hybrid simulation of distributed large-scale critical infrastructures

Modern critical infrastructures represent the pivotal assets upon which the current society greatly relies to support welfare, economy, and quality of life. Nowadays, the trend is to re-organize these infrastructures by applying a System of Systems concept, where the sparse islands are progressively interconnected by means of proper middleware solutions through local or wide-area networks. The huge complexity of such systems makes the integration task among components extremely challenging. Indeed, it may introduce unexpected system behaviors, mainly affecting dependability and performance, that usually become evident only during systems operations and, in particular, in presence of stress or unexpected conditions. Additionally, as they cannot be detected earlier, these problems require complex on-site operations resulting in increased maintenance costs and overspending in terms of personnel resources. A promising way to cope with these new complex systems and to reduce maintenance costs, is to reproduce such distributed systems locally, and let them run prior to the actual execution on-site, in order to get knowledge about their real behavior and define mitigation means and improvement actions. On the other hand, the evaluation of this systems requires sophisticated modeling, simulation, and experimentation infrastructure, which needs the integration of existing simulation environments, real sub-systems, and experimental platforms, which have to interact in a coordinated way. Therefore, hybrid and distributed simulation strategies, supported by novel technologies for resources virtualization and working environment reproduction, represent the most promising way to define the needed strategies to actually support such complex paradigms [1,2]