PHOENI2X -- A European Cyber Resilience Framework With Artificial-Intelligence-Assisted Orchestration, Automation and Response Capabilities for Business Continuity and Recovery, Incident Response, and Information Exchange

As digital technologies become more pervasive in society and the economy, cybersecurity incidents become more frequent and impactful. According to the NIS and NIS2 Directives, EU Member States and their Operators of Essential Services must establish a minimum baseline set of cybersecurity capabilities and engage in cross-border coordination and cooperation. However, this is only a small step towards European cyber resilience. In this landscape, preparedness, shared situational awareness, and coordinated incident response are essential for effective cyber crisis management and resilience. Motivated by the above, this paper presents PHOENI2X, an EU-funded project aiming to design, develop, and deliver a Cyber Resilience Framework providing Artificial-Intelligence-assisted orchestration, automation and response capabilities for business continuity and recovery, incident response, and information exchange, tailored to the needs of Operators of Essential Services and the EU Member State authorities entrusted with cybersecurity

Dynamic Slice Scaling Mechanisms for 5G Multi-domain Environments

Network slicing is an essential 5G innovation whereby the network is partitioned into logical segments, so that Communication Service Providers (CSPs) can offer differentiated services for verticals and use cases. In many 5G use cases, network requirements vary over time and CSPs must dynamically adapt network slices to satisfy the contractual network slice QoS, cooperating and using each others’ resources, e.g. when resources of a single CSP are not sufficient or suitable to maintain all it’s current SLAs. While this need for dynamic cross-CSP cooperation is widely recognized, realization of this need is not yet possible due to gaps both in business processes and in technical capabilities. In this paper, we present a 5GZORRO approach to dynamic cross-CSP slice scaling. Our approach both enables CSPs to collaborate, providing security and trust with smart multi-party contracts, and facilitates thus achieved collaboration to enable resource sharing across multiple administrative domains, either during slice establishment or when already existing slice needs to expand or shrink. Our approach allows automating both business and technical processes involved in dynamic lifecycle management of cross-CSP network slices, following ETSI’s Zero-Touch Network and Service Management (ZSM) closed-loop architecture, and relying on resource-sharing Marketplace, Distributed Ledger (DL), and Operational Data Lake. We show how this approach is realized in truly Cloud Naive way, with Kubernetes as both business and technical cross-domain orchestrator. We then showcase applicability of the proposed solution for dynamic scaling of Content Delivery Network (CDN) service

"Geo-characterization” of selected areas in Crete, Greece, towards realistic assessment of seismic design actions

Summarization: The geo-characterization of site conditions is crucial for the estimation of regional elastic spectra. The work to be done in the framework of the “GEO- CHARACTERIZATION” THALIS-project, will combine geotechnical and geophysical methods and evaluate them to estimate critical geotechnical parameters. Although geotechnical tests in lab may provide more accurate estimates of geotechnical parameters, they require costly and time consuming drilling procedures. On the other hand geophysical methods are useful in providing estimates in situ of subsurface physical properties, which are not directly related to geotechnical parameters. Within “GEO-CHARACTERIZATION” THALIS-project a pilot survey for geotechnical characterization at selected sites of Hellenic Accelerometric Network in Crete will be conducted by employing geotechnical, geological and geophysical techniques. Subsequently, by correlating “geo-data” collected within this project, relations of certain mechanical parameters obtained in laboratory or/and in situ with geophysical parameters for typical geologic formations and soils will be established. The “GEO-CHARACTERIZATION” project, will focus on the influence of dynamic loads on geotechnical phenomena related to the static stress field variation, the estimation of site effects due to seismic motion and the proposal of regional elastic spectra for seismic provisions as well as their comparison with the corresponding elastic design spectra of Eurocode 8 (EC8).Παρουσιάστηκε στο: 13th International Congress of the Geological Society of Greec