SoK: Security of Microservice Applications: A Practitioners' Perspective on Challenges and Best Practices

Cloud-based application deployment is becoming increasingly popular among businesses, thanks to the emergence of microservices. However, securing such architectures is a challenging task since traditional security concepts cannot be directly applied to microservice architectures due to their distributed nature. The situation is exacerbated by the scattered nature of guidelines and best practices advocated by practitioners and organizations in this field. This research paper we aim to shay light over the current microservice security discussions hidden within Grey Literature (GL) sources. Particularly, we identify the challenges that arise when securing microservice architectures, as well as solutions recommended by practitioners to address these issues. For this, we conducted a systematic GL study on the challenges and best practices of microservice security present in the Internet with the goal of capturing relevant discussions in blogs, white papers, and standards. We collected 312 GL sources from which 57 were rigorously classified and analyzed. This analysis on the one hand validated past academic literature studies in the area of microservice security, but it also identified improvements to existing methodologies pointing towards future research directions.Comment: Accepted at the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2022

User Innovation Toolkits für situationsbezogene Dienste. Konzeptionell-evaluative Geschäftsmodellanalyse und prototypische Implementierung.

Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit User Innovation Toolkits für situationsbezogene Dienste. Während User Innovation Toolkits Endnutzern erlauben, mobile Dienste selbst zu gestalten, haben situationsbezogene Dienste die Fähigkeit, sich an die Bedürfnisse des Nutzers und die Nutzungssituation anzupassen. Aufbauend auf einer empirischen Studie konnten drei wesentliche Herausforderungen der mobilen Telekommunikationsbranche identifiziert werden: Erstens, sind die Bedürfnisse von Nutzern mobiler Dienste hochgradig heterogen und ändern sich laufend. Zweitens, mangelt es an Geschäftsmodellen, um von dem wachsenden Markt zu profitieren. Schließlich sind technologische Probleme hinsichtlich adaptierbarer und lernfähiger Informationssysteme zu lösen. Die Untersuchung der theoretischen Grundlagen fokussierte vor allem auf den Transfer von Kundenwissen, der Wissensemergenz und der Situationstheorie und ihrer Anwendungen. Im Rahmen der Aktionsforschung konnte gemeinsam mit Fachexperten ein Ökonomisch sinnvolles generisches Geschäftsmodell für User Innovation Toolkits konzipiert und evaluiert, ein neues Vorgehensmodell zur Anforderungsanalyse generiert und die Informationsarchitektur zur Realisierung situationsbezogener Dienste modelliert werden. Die Synthese stellt den Prototyp eines User Innovation Toolkits für situationsbezogene Dienste dar. (Autorenref.)Security: staffonl

Investigating polygenic burden in age at disease onset in bipolar disorder: Findings from an international multicentric study

OBJECTIVES: Bipolar disorder (BD) with early disease onset is associated with an unfavorable clinical outcome and constitutes a clinically and biologically homogenous subgroup within the heterogeneous BD spectrum. Previous studies have found an accumulation of early age at onset (AAO) in BD families and have therefore hypothesized that there is a larger genetic contribution to the early-onset cases than to late onset BD. To investigate the genetic background of this subphenotype, we evaluated whether an increased polygenic burden of BD- and schizophrenia (SCZ)-associated risk variants is associated with an earlier AAO in BD patients. METHODS: A total of 1995 BD type 1 patients from the Consortium of Lithium Genetics (ConLiGen), PsyCourse and Bonn-Mannheim samples were genotyped and their BD and SCZ polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were calculated using the summary statistics of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium as a training data set. AAO was either separated into onset groups of clinical interest (childhood and adolescence [≤18 years] vs adulthood [>18 years]) or considered as a continuous measure. The associations between BD- and SCZ-PRSs and AAO were evaluated with regression models. RESULTS: BD- and SCZ-PRSs were not significantly associated with age at disease onset. Results remained the same when analyses were stratified by site of recruitment. CONCLUSIONS: The current study is the largest conducted so far to investigate the association between the cumulative BD and SCZ polygenic risk and AAO in BD patients. The reported negative results suggest that such a polygenic influence, if there is any, is not large, and highlight the importance of conducting further, larger scale studies to obtain more information on the genetic architecture of this clinically relevant phenotype

Association of Polygenic Score and the involvement of Cholinergic and Glutamatergic Pathways with Lithium Treatment Response in Patients with Bipolar Disorder

Journal title: Research Squar

Association of polygenic score for major depression with response to lithium in patients with bipolar disorder

Lithium is a first-line medication for bipolar disorder (BD), but only one in three patients respond optimally to the drug. Since evidence shows a strong clinical and genetic overlap between depression and bipolar disorder, we investigated whether a polygenic susceptibility to major depression is associated with response to lithium treatment in patients with BD. Weighted polygenic scores (PGSs) were computed for major depression (MD) at different GWAS p value thresholds using genetic data obtained from 2586 bipolar patients who received lithium treatment and took part in the Consortium on Lithium Genetics (ConLi+Gen) study. Summary statistics from genome-wide association studies in MD (135,458 cases and 344,901 controls) from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) were used for PGS weighting. Response to lithium treatment was defined by continuous scores and categorical outcome (responders versus non-responders) using measurements on the Alda scale. Associations between PGSs of MD and lithium treatment response were assessed using a linear and binary logistic regression modeling for the continuous and categorical outcomes, respectively. The analysis was performed for the entire cohort, and for European and Asian sub-samples. The PGSs for MD were significantly associated with lithium treatment response in multi-ethnic, European or Asian populations, at various p value thresholds. Bipolar patients with a low polygenic load for MD were more likely to respond well to lithium, compared to those patients with high polygenic load [lowest vs highest PGS quartiles, multi-ethnic sample: OR = 1.54 (95% CI: 1.18–2.01) and European sample: OR = 1.75 (95% CI: 1.30–2.36)]. While our analysis in the Asian sample found equivalent effect size in the same direction: OR = 1.71 (95% CI: 0.61–4.90), this was not statistically significant. Using PGS decile comparison, we found a similar trend of association between a high genetic loading for MD and lower response to lithium. Our findings underscore the genetic contribution to lithium response in BD and support the emerging concept of a lithium-responsive biotype in BD