An Agent-Based Collaborative Platform for the Optimized Trading of Renewable Energy within a Community, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2014, nr 4

Cities are increasingly recognized for their ability to play a catalytic role in addressing climate and energy challenges using technologically innovative approaches. Since energy used in urban areas accounts for about 40% of total EU energy consumption, a change of direction towards renewable energy is necessary in order to alleviate the usage of carbonized electricity and also to save money. A combination of IT and telecommunication technologies is necessary to enable the energy and resources saving. ICT based solutions can be used to enable energy and money saving not only for a single building, but for the whole community of a neighborhood. In this paper a model for the energy cost minimization of a neighborhood together with an agent-based interaction model that reproduces the proposed formal representation is presented. Furthermore the authors present a prototype implementation of this model and first experimental tests

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

Design of an agent based monitoring framework for federated clouds

Abstract—In the last years, the Cloud services market experienced an extremely rapid growth, which may lead to severe scalability problems. Therefore, in order to cope with the resource capacity limits of a single Cloud provider, as well as to address the vendor lock-in problem associated to the choice of a single proprietary Cloud solution, the concept of federating multiple heterogeneous organizations is receiving an increasing attention by the key players in the Cloud services market; this model enables the implementation of environmental diversity for Cloud applications and overcomes the provisioning and scalability limits of a single Cloud. One of the main issues within a Cloud federation is related to the monitoring of the application deployed on resources coming from different vendors belonging to the federation. In this work we present an agent based approach to monitor the user’s Cloud environment provided by the federation: a multi-layer architecture is proposed where each part aims at monitoring different aspects of the multi-Cloud infrastructure, starting from the detection of critical conditions on low level parameters for the computational units and composing different monitoring levels in order to check the federated SLA

Hybrid Localization for Ubiquitous Services

The business sector is exploring the locations and movements information of mobile users with the purpose to improve the business operations and increase the sales volume. In this scenario, the location systems should be able of tracking the mobile users in any place they move to, both indoor and outdoor scenarios. In this paper, we propose a hybrid location approach designed to support the choice and the switching between different positioning technologies supported by the mobile device and available in the surrounding environment, in a dynamic and transparent way during the user movement. It combines signal strength-based fingerprinting techniques for indoor positioning together with GPS for the outdoor localization, and performs opportunistic technology switching according to a threshold based mechanism. The resulting solution is able to leverage the different features of the location technologies, in order to provide ubiquitous services across indoor and outdoor scenarios, as well as to minimize power consumption of the mobile device

Monitoring and management of a cloud application within a federation of cloud providers

Cloud federation is an emerging computing model where multiple resources from independent cloud providers are leveraged to create large-scale distributed virtual computing clusters, operating as within a single cloud organisation. This concept of service aggregation is characterised by interoperability features, which can address different problems about inter-cloud collaboration. One of the main issues within a cloud federation is related to the monitoring of the application deployed on resources coming from different vendors belonging to the federation. We present an agent-based architecture that aims at monitoring the user’s cloud environment provided by the federation: the elasticity of the proposed architecture allows the configuration and customisation of the monitoring infrastructure to adapt it to the specific cloud application. Agents will be strengthened by algorithms and rules used to monitor QoS parameters that are critical for the specific application. The prototypal implementation of the proposed framework will be applied on a testbed application to validate the monitoring architecture

Intrusion detection in federated clouds

Abstract: In order to overcome the provisioning and scalability limits of a single cloud, cloud federation appears as the computing model in which multiple resources from independent cloud providers can be shared to create large-scale distributed virtual clusters. On the other hand, these complex architectures become an attractive target for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Although, federated cloud environments have large amount of resources and profound dynamic allocation capability, which can be used to face DDoS attacks, they are however vulnerable to attacks that aim at compromising the service level agreements. In this paper, we investigate the key research topics for supporting distributed intrusion detection in a federated cloud environment. We propose a scalable intrusion detection solution, which can be used by cloud providers to protect the federated cloud infrastructure, as well as offered to the cloud service providers to monitor the hosted applications. We present a multi-layer architecture, which exploits a publish/subscribe middleware to collect and share security information in the federated cloud infrastructure. Moreover, we present an open-source framework, which provides features and interfaces to develop and deploy security components, as well as to define customised event correlation rules used to detect possible inter-cloud attacks