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Big Data

Design Space for Cyber Security Analytical Systems

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

Adaptive Architectures for Cyber Security Analytics 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

Data Exfiltration: External Attack Vectors and Countermeasures

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

An Approach to Designing and Evaluating Web of Things (WoT) Systems

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

Smart Campus: Model Driven Security for Systems of Systems

Socio-technical systems underpinning smart and connected cities are good examples of systems of systems – where each constituent system act and behave independents but these systems are connected with each other and provide each other different services. Security is one of the key aspects of systems of systems, e.g., smart city systems or smart campus systems. It is extremely complex and challenging undertaking to model and analyse a secure systems of systems. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is expected to bring much needed support to bring effectiveness and efficiency in terms of automating some of the tedious and error-prone tasks. To support a MDE approach to secure smart cities systems, we need appropriate meta-models and suitable tools that can convert the meta-models in graphical editors that can support the modelling and analysis of secure smart cities applications. In collaboration with researchers from France, we have been working on a project aimed at developing graphical editors and model cases of secure systems in a smart cities, or smart campus. Apart from senior researchers from Adelaide and France, Zi Yang Pang has been working on summer scholarship on this project. The project has the following goals and scope and we are hoping to apply the meta-model language for secure smart cities systems very soon and afterwards we plan to extend the tools to provide end-to-end support. Read More »Smart Campus: Model Driven Security for Systems of Systems

Designing and Evolving Architectures for Big Data Applications

Big Data applications are playing critical role for all sorts of organisations. Whilst data scientist is considered a critical role for big data applications, the role of software architect has become even more critical as appropriate design and careful implementation are the key to successful big data applications for supporting organisational decisions and business processes. since this breed of applications are relatively new, the knowledge and experience for designing and evolving architectures for big data applications are in high demand. It is important that organisations build specific knowledge and competency in designing and evaluating software architectures for big data applications – this is one of the key areas where we have been focusing on R&D efforts for sometime now. We have started disseminating our work through different channels for seeking the application of our work through industrial partnerships. Recently, I gave a short talk on designing and evolving architectures for big data applications (Talk’s presentation) during the Adelaide Big Data Meet up called, Big Data Development. Read More »Designing and Evolving Architectures for Big Data Applications

Reference Architecture for Cloud-Based Tools as a Service Workspace Completed

A few years ago we started an exciting and challenging project to design and implement a reference architecture for providing Tools as a Service (TaaS). That project was aimed at developing and evaluating an infrastructure that can host and provision tools for supporting engineering efforts in general and software engineering in particular. There is no doubt that the project turned out to be more challenging than we anticipated but I’m glad that one phase of that project has been successfully completed through Aufeef Chuahan’s PhD project. It is a great pleasure to state that Aufeef has successfully completed and submitted his PhD thesis for assessment – its a big achievement for him. We will be making the reference architecture and its implementation public very soon.Read More »Reference Architecture for Cloud-Based Tools as a Service Workspace Completed

D2D CRC Project on Reference Architecture for Defence Big Data Systems

Big Data systems (i.e., data-intensive applications) have become one of the key priority areas for all sorts of organizations (i.e., private or public). Big Data is usually characterized by huge amount of diverse set of data that cannot be easily (or timely) processed using the conventional data processing approaches and technologies. For example, the data coming from 9100 tweets per second or the data emitted from the jet engines of the aircraft of the 2500 flights that cross Atlantic every day.  Data to Decisions (D2D), a new initiative under the Cooperative Research Centres Program, is aimed at inventing new and innovative techniques and technologies for supporting several functions of Big Data systems such as data capture and storage, data transmission, data curation, data analysis, and data visualization. One of the first projects of D2D CRC is designing a Reference Architecture (RA) for Defence Big Data Systems. Whilst there are already several dozens of references architectures for big data systems, one can question the needs of such an effort.Read More »D2D CRC Project on Reference Architecture for Defence Big Data Systems

Reference Architecture for Cloud-Based Workspace of Tools

A few years ago, we started working on designing a cloud-based infrastructure for providing Engineering tools as services, an approach we called Tools as a Service (TaaS). We have made significant progress towards materialising the concept of developing an infrastructure for providing vendor and technology neutral platform for providing Tools as Services. Since such an infrastructure can’t be too generic as each stage of the software development lifecycle has its own set of tools with different features, workflows, and data structures, there was a need for having a reference architecture that can fulfil the functional and non-functional requirements of an infrastructure that can host and provision tools as services. Now we have developed a reference architecture for workspace that can provide tools as a service, a recent paper on this work can be downloaded. This reference architecture provides the key specifications and architectural guidelines Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) design principles.Read More »Reference Architecture for Cloud-Based Workspace of Tools

Keynote Talk at the Big Data & Cloud Computing Conference

It was a great pleasure to have an opportunity to attend the fourth edition of the Big Data and Cloud Computing Conference in Sydney at the beginning of December, 2014. I had had the privilege of listening to several great keynote speakers, all of them well known leaders of their respective areas of research and development. Each of the keynote speakers shared invaluable insights and vision about the research and practice of Big Data and Cloud Computing. I was also honoured to be invited to give a keynote talk at the conference. I chose to speak about our recent topic of research in this area of Designing and Evolving Software Architectures for Cloud-Based Systems. The slides embedded in the previous link and the abstract below can give you some ideas about our work in the area and we will be happy to share more details of our further work in progress and the possibilities of collaboration with researchers and industry. Read More »Keynote Talk at the Big Data & Cloud Computing Conference