Cyber Hygiene Maturity Assessment Framework for Smart Grid Scenarios

Cyber hygiene is a relatively new paradigm premised on the idea that organizations and stakeholders are able to achieve additional robustness and overall cybersecurity strength by implementing and following sound security practices. It is a preventive approach entailing high organizational culture and education for information cybersecurity to enhance resilience and protect sensitive data. In an attempt to achieve high resilience of Smart Grids against negative impacts caused by different types of common, predictable but also uncommon, unexpected, and uncertain threats and keep entities safe, the Secure and PrivatE smArt gRid (SPEAR) Horizon 2020 project has created an organization-wide cyber hygiene policy and developed a Cyber Hygiene Maturity assessment Framework (CHMF). This article presents the assessment framework for evaluating Cyber Hygiene Level (CHL) in relation to the Smart Grids. Complementary to the SPEAR Cyber Hygiene Maturity Model (CHMM), we propose a self-assessment methodology based on a questionnaire for Smart Grid cyber hygiene practices evaluation. The result of the assessment can be used as a cyber-health check to define countermeasures and to reapprove cyber hygiene rules and security standards and specifications adopted by the Smart Grid operator organization. The proposed methodology is one example of a resilient approach to cybersecurity. It can be applied for the assessment of the CHL of Smart Grids operating organizations with respect to a number of recommended good practices in cyber hygiene.This project has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 787011 (SPEAR

Service Level Agreement-based GDPR Compliance and Security assurance in (multi)Cloud-based systems

Compliance with the new European General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) and security assurance are currently two major challenges of Cloud-based systems. GDPR compliance implies both privacy and security mechanisms definition, enforcement and control, including evidence collection. This paper presents a novel DevOps framework aimed at supporting Cloud consumers in designing, deploying and operating (multi)Cloud systems that include the necessary privacy and security controls for ensuring transparency to end-users, third parties in service provision (if any) and law enforcement authorities. The framework relies on the risk-driven specification at design time of privacy and security level objectives in the system Service Level Agreement (SLA) and in their continuous monitoring and enforcement at runtime.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644429 and No 780351, MUSA project and ENACT project, respectively. We would also like to acknowledge all the members of the MUSA Consortium and ENACT Consortium for their valuable help

Cyber hygiene maturity assessment framework for smart grid scenarios

Cyber hygiene is a relatively new paradigm premised on the idea that organizations and stakeholders are able to achieve additional robustness and overall cybersecurity strength by implementing and following sound security practices. It is a preventive approach entailing high organizational culture and education for information cybersecurity to enhance resilience and protect sensitive data. In an attempt to achieve high resilience of Smart Grids against negative impacts caused by different types of common, predictable but also uncommon, unexpected, and uncertain threats and keep entities safe, the Secure and PrivatE smArt gRid (SPEAR) Horizon 2020 project has created an organization-wide cyber hygiene policy and developed a Cyber Hygiene Maturity assessment Framework (CHMF). This article presents the assessment framework for evaluating Cyber Hygiene Level (CHL) in relation to the Smart Grids. Complementary to the SPEAR Cyber Hygiene Maturity Model (CHMM), we propose a self-assessment methodology based on a questionnaire for Smart Grid cyber hygiene practices evaluation. The result of the assessment can be used as a cyber-health check to define countermeasures and to reapprove cyber hygiene rules and security standards and specifications adopted by the Smart Grid operator organization. The proposed methodology is one example of a resilient approach to cybersecurity. It can be applied for the assessment of the CHL of Smart Grids operating organizations with respect to a number of recommended good practices in cyber hygiene

Security-by-design in Clouds: A Security-SLA Driven Methodology to Build Secure Cloud Applications

This paper presents a security-by-design methodology for the development of cloud applications, which relies on Security SLAs as a means to express their security requirements. The process followed to build such Security SLAs entails the application of a risk analysis procedure aimed at identifying the main vulnerabilities affecting a cloud application and allows to determine the countermeasures to consider at design time in order to thwart the main existing threats. The paper illustrates a proof-of-concept application that founds on standard risk assessment tools and adopts state-of-art Security Control Frameworks and a novel Security SLA model for the security requirements representation