An assessment of the ICT Security Skills in the Industrial Sector as Provided Through Education and Training

Cybersecurity has become an increasingly important aspect of public policy as Internet traffic increases and mounting cyber threats affect the operation of governments and businesses as well as the everyday life of citizens. Cybersecurity policy-making is at a turning point, becoming a national policy priority with explicit strategies in several countries. Even though the availability of high-level ICT security skills would significantly contribute in leveraging the economic growth of companies, still there is a lack of ICT security skills in Europe. In this paper, the ICT security skills gap between the industry needs and the academia/training curricula is investigated in seven European regions, followed by an analysis of the findings. Based on the findings, a framework is proposed to narrow the security skills gap

Adaptive Square-Shaped Trajectory-Based Service Location Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we propose an adaptive square-shaped trajectory (ASST)-based service location method to ensure load scalability in wireless sensor networks. This first establishes a square-shaped trajectory over the nodes that surround a target point computed by the hash function and any user can access it, using the hash. Both the width and the size of the trajectory are dynamically adjustable, depending on the number of queries made to the service information on the trajectory. The number of sensor nodes on the trajectory varies in proportion to the changing trajectory shape, allowing high loads to be distributed around the hot spot area

A Systematic Approach to Cryptocurrency Fees

This paper is devoted to the study of transaction fees in massively replicated open blockchain systems. In such systems, like Bitcoin, a snapshot of current state required for the validation of transactions is being held in the memory, which eventually becomes a scarce resource. Uncontrolled state growth can lead to security issues. We propose a modification of a transaction fee scheme based on how much additional space will be needed for the objects created as a result of transaction processing and for how long will they live in the state. We also work out the way to combine fees charged for different resources spent (bandwidth, random-access state memory, processor cycles) in a composite fee and demonstrate consistency of the approach by analyzing the statistics from Ethereum network. We show a possible implementation for state-related fee in a form of regular payments to miners

Leveraging the next-generation power grid:Data sharing and associated partnerships

Data delivery in the power grid today is, for the most part, hard-coded, tedious to implement and change, and does not provide any real end-to-end guarantees. Applications have started to emerge that require real-time data delivery in order to provide a wide-area assessment of the health of the power grid. This paper presents two novel communication infrastructures that facilitate the delivery of power data to intended recipients, each based on a different communication paradigm. The necessity of forming and managing trusted partnerships in either framework is further discussed

ICGrid: Enabling Intensive Care Medical Research on the EGEE Grid

Abstract. Healthcare Information Systems are nowadays among the world’s largest, fastest-growing and most information intensive industries. Additionally, Intensive Care Units are widely considered as the most technologically advanced environments within a hospital. In suc

Towards More Extensible and Resilient Real-Time Information Dissemination for the Electric Power Grid

The availability and integrity of the electric power grid heavily depends on maintaining a very close balance between its supply and demand. To achieve that balance, grid operators rely on real-time statu

Security, trust and QoS in next-generation control and communication for large power systems

control applications The present communication architecture supporting control of the electric power grid makes it difficult to use the wealth of data collected at high rates in substations, retarding their use in new applications for controlling the grid. A flexible, real-time data network would make it possible to use these data for many more control and protection applications, having the potential to increase the reliability of the grid and increase its operating efficiency. Example applications that could use these data include: decentralized load frequency control; closedloop voltage control; transient and small-signal stabilization; and special protection schemes taking advantage of data gathered over a wide area. Such applications and the flexibility of the underlying communication network imply greater sharing of data between the utilities making up the grid as well as performance, availability and reliability requirements. Mechanisms for managing security, trust, timeliness and path redundancy are thus important components of communication networks to support these control applications. This paper examines the security, trust and QoS requirements imposed by these applications and show how they are met by mechanisms included in the GridStat middleware framework that we are developing