Big Data Systems (BDS) (i.e., data-intensive applications) have become one of the key priority areas for all sorts of organizations. We have been conducting R&D on different aspects of Data intensive applications in general and… Read More »Engineering Data-Driven Secure Software Services
Cyber Security infrastructures are increasingly relying on big data technologies for capturing, storing, and analyzing huge amount of security events data. Designing and evolving systems that can effectively and efficiently combine big data technologies and cybersecurity are hugely challenging undertakings. Whilst the knowledge for designing cyber security analytics systems has increasing for sometime, there was no consolidated piece of work on design mechanisms, also called tactics, for architecting big data cyber security analytics systems – very proud to share that our recent effort has attempted to fill that gap by providing a consolidated piece of knowledge about the quality attributes considered important for cyber security analytics systems and architectural tactics can help achieve the desired set of quality attributes – such a consolidated knowledge about any aspect of software design is called Design Space – ours is a design space for cyber security analytics systems. This work has recently been accepted for publication in one of the top quality journal of software systems, Journal of Systems and Software. We will be happy to provide a copy of the article on request and following is the abstract of the article. Read More »Design Space for Cyber Security Analytical Systems
It is becoming quite hard to imagine software systems that wouldn’t need adaptation as part of their runtime requirements. With the increasing demand for adaptivity by design, the knowledge and skills in this area are lagging far behind. Cyber Analytics systems are a new breed of systems that combine big data technologies and cyber security systems for capturing, manning, and analyzing cyber security events data. Such systems need to be adaptive for supporting real-time analysis of the security events data. Our research has been focused on this important area for sometime and now we have started reporting the results of our work. Recently, one of our articles on this topic has been accepted in a prestigious software architecture conference, International Conference on Software Architecture, which will be held in Hamburg. Following is the abstract of the article and if it interests to you, please feel free to ask for a copy. Read More »Adaptive Architectures for Cyber Security Analytics Systems
An increasing number of organisations focusing on security orchestration approaches and solutions to automate the processes of their Security Operation Centre (SOC). There are hundreds of approaches and tools to support security orchestration, hence, practitioners find it hard to access a consolidated material on the available solutions and researchers are unable to figure out the gaps. Our team has tried to address this need by reporting a systematic horizon scan of the security orchestration approaches and tools – the report has been published in one of the most prestigious journal of computing, ACM Computing Survey – the work is led by Chadni Islam, and Data61’s Surya Nepal is the collaborator. The abstracts of the paper is below and interested readers are welcome to contact us for a copy of the paper. Read More »A Systematic Horizon Scan of Security Orchestration Approaches and Tools
It was a great pleasure to visit the Secure Systems Group at the Aalto University of Finland. I was hosted by Professor N. Asokan, the leader of the group and a leading authority on different… Read More »Building and Leveraging Design Spaces for Architecting Contemporary Software Systems
We are continuously progressing on the plan for strengthening our capabilities in Cyber Security. To achieve this goal, we have been not only building internal capabilities but also forming and leveraging strategic collaborations. Out of one of our recent collaborations, with Giannis and Rami, in the areas of Cyber Security has resulted a high quality piece of work that has been accepted in a highly profile journal, ACM Computing Survey. The abstract of this paper is below and can provide some useful insights to the potential readers of this work. We are hoping that this piece of work will lead to systematic classification and comparison of architectural level Cyber Security Solutions and develop and evaluate new techniques, approaches, and tools for designing and evaluating security centric large scale distributed systems. Below is the abstract from the paper.Read More »Our New Work on Self-Adaptive Security for large-scale Open Environments
With regards to our work on Cyber Security, we have recently successfully completed a collaborative piece fo work with researchers from Security Lancaster, University of Lancaster, UK. Our collaborative work was focused on identifying and understanding Data Exfiltration: External Vectors and Countermeasures and has been accepted in Journal of Network and Computer Applications with the following title and abstract. The pieces of paper provide an extensive literature review that is expected to be leveraged for understanding the key external attack vectors and the countermeasures and the areas for future research.
“Data Exfiltration: A Review of External Attack Vectors and Countermeasures”Read More »Data Exfiltration: External Attack Vectors and Countermeasures
The ongoing collaboration with the Maritime Division of Defence and Science Technology Group (DST) has resulted in another very useful piece of work that we are very glad to share through this blog. We have been conducting a series of Research and Development (R&D) projects with the same group in the Maritime Division of DST for evaluating technological solutions for building secure and scalable private clouds for mission critical systems. Given the increasing adopting of containerised solutions, our collaborators were interested in evaluating Docker for secure and scale private cloud – that means both security and scalability are the key quality attributes for their domain. Ben Ramsey from my team led the efforts of carrying out this work that has resulted in a detailed technical report. We believe that this technical report will be very useful for anyone interested in knowing about the security and scalability aspects of container technologies like Docker when used for building a private cloud infrastructure. Here is the report titled, Evaluating Docker for Secure and Scalable Private Cloud with Container Technologies, and the abstract has been copied from the report below:Read More »Evaluating Docker for Secure and Scalable Private Cloud with Container Technologies
Internet of Things (IoT) have emerged a popular technology that underpinning several innovative products and services. Internet of Everything (IoE) or Web of Things (WoT) are real or virtual networks of things (or services) that can be meaningfully quarried or combined in order to build and provide different types of services. Recently, we have a book chapter, Using Reference Architecture for Design and Evaluation of Web of Things Systems, has been included a newly published book, Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web, edited by Michael Sheng, Yongrui Qin, Lina Yao, and Boualem Benatallah. The abstract of our book chapter is below as it may interest to some of the readers. The book chapter provides a methodological approach and technical details about applying a reference architectures to support the design and evaluation of Web of Things Systems. The research involved students from a software architecture course offered at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The abstract of the chapter is below:
Read More »An Approach to Designing and Evaluating Web of Things (WoT) Systems
Container technologies, particularly Docker Engine, have been gaining significant popularity and adoption for building development and operational virtualised infrastructures. An increasing number of cloud technologies have started integrating container technologies into their platforms. While the performance and scalability advantages of containers are well known, there have been a number of concerns about the security of container-based solutions.
Through our ongoing collaboration with Defence Science and Technology Group we have just completed a project focused on extensively studying and analysing security of container technology, Docker. This project involved several other strategically important evaluative milestones about which I’ll write separately. Here is the report on security analysis of Docker for building private cloud. A few key points of this report are: Read More »Learning from a Detailed Security Analysis of Containerised Technologies