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Security

Towards a Cyber Security Assessment Framework for Smart Grid

Modern energy systems are interconnected through public and private networks, hence, such systems can be target of cyber attacks – Smart Grid is an example of a system of systems which can be targeted for security breaches. Smart grid systems may be targeted using the vulnerabilities are unknown, zero day attacks. It is important to have a comprehensive support infrastructure for identifying and mitigating potential risks to smart grid systems. However, such an infrastructure should be developed and evaluated after having a deep understanding of the existing practices and processes of managing cyber security risk in the energy sector for smart grid systems. I’ve recently supervised a project that was aimed at addressing the challenges, tends, and requirements in the Danish electricity sector.Read More »Towards a Cyber Security Assessment Framework for Smart Grid

Visiting Software School at Fudan University, China

During my recent visit to China, I visited the Software Engineering Laboratory, Software School at Fudan University in Shanghai. It has always a great pleasure visiting Professor Xin Peng and his team who are conducting an excellent research on challenging and important topics of Software Product Lines, Software Maintenance and Evolution, and Requirements Engineering. This was my second visit to the group and I always find quite useful and important research threads being followed by different graduate students and academic staff associated with the laboratory under the direction of Professor Xin Peng. I was also invited to give a talk to the group. I chose to present our work on privacy in mobile devices and data exfiltration challenges and countermeasures using Evidence Based Software Engineering. This work is ongoing and we are continuing updating the work on privacy issues in mobile computing and now this work would have collaborators from Open University UK. The abstract of the talk can give some ideas about our ongoing work in these areas:Read More »Visiting Software School at Fudan University, China

Building a private cloud for an academic environment

While the perceived and real technical and soio-technical concerns about public cloud solutions may be discouraging many organizations from migrating and/or using public clouds, many organizations are resorting to solutions involving private and community clouds. The increasing trend of private clouds is also making inroads into academic circles where a large amount of data may have very specific privacy and security constraints. However, a large number of academic environments, especially individuals and small teams of researchers, are unlikely to have the required knowledge, skills, and time to fully understand and appropriately address the selection of appropriate hardware and software, and configuration and deployment challenges. In order to provide such a guideline, we decided to carry out a project aimed at building a private cloud using open source solutions like Eucalyptus and OpenNebula. The key objective of this project was to develop a reference guide for designing and implementing a private cloud using open source software, and the focus was primarily on practical aspects concerning design, installation and implementation. The project was carried out by Zoran Pantic under my supervision. Zoran, being an IT professional, leveraged his huge amount of IT infrastructure knowledge and skills to build a private cloud that we plan to use and extend for our research and education on cloud computing. Zoran and I plan to further refine and publish the guidelines from the project report he has written. If you are interested in getting the report in its current form, please write to us.Read More »Building a private cloud for an academic environment

Cloud Computing – Adoption Barriers

Organizations and practitioners are well aware, and largely convinced, of the claimed benefits of cloud computing, however, they are concerned about the general lack of knowledge about the potential uncertainties and risks involved in adopting cloud computing. This is one of the conclusions from the first phase of our research on cloud computing adoption barriers. This phase of the research was carried out as a Masters thesis project of Kristina Jucyte under my supervision.
An initial analysis from the gathered data indicates that security, privacy, legal, availability, support and quality of service were the main concerns. A large number of participants were concerned about about data location and legal framework that mmay govern the information, jurisdiction realization, cloud’s outage and information accessibility. A majority of them recommended that organizations need to carefully study the regulartory and business expectations of their industry and commercial process before start using cloud computing services.Read More »Cloud Computing – Adoption Barriers

New Course on Cloud Computing

I have another exciting news with regards to our ongoing activities in the area of Cloud computing research and education. The exciting news is that we will be offering a brand new course on Cloud computing from Spring 2011 at the IT University of Copenhagen. I just heard that the course proposal has received green signal from all the relevant stakeholders. I am quite excited to know the outcome of my proposal as I had put a significant amount of effort in designing this course; Moreover, I am also convinced that this course will serve professional development and educational needs of students with a diverse set of backgrounds as their employers have already been using some form of Cloud computing or planning to do so. Hence, this course will provide the practitioners and students with an excellent opportunity to learn about this new paradigm of computing.

For the interested readers, I am providing a brief synopsis of the course below. If you are interested in knowing more about the course details, I’ll be glad to answer your inquiries. Read More »New Course on Cloud Computing

EASI-Clouds gets green signal from ITEA!!!

It is a fantastic news that ITEA has given our PO named “EASI-Clouds” a thumb up and invited us to submit a full project proposal. All the consortium partners from five countries put a lot of effort in preparing a very competitive PO and now more hard work would be required for prepare a high quality proposal that addresses recommendations of the reviewers and national authorities. For the Danish consortium, we need to do much more work as we intend to strengthen our consortium as well as convince the national authorities for the funding because Denmark has not funded any ITEA label project in the past. However, we are very hopeful because EASE-Clouds aims to address the key cloud computing challenges, which are at the heart of a large number of Danish public and private enterprizes. Hence, we intend to work quite hard with our other partner, Alexandra Institute, to attract more partners and funding for this strategically very important project, which will enable Danish researchers and practitioners to work on developing and evaluating cutting edge solutions to key challenges involved in successfully adopting and exploiting cloud computing.
Read More »EASI-Clouds gets green signal from ITEA!!!