Aine MacDermott

Considering an elastic scaling model for cloud Security

Cloud computing usage is growing, and soon the vast majority of organisations will rely on some form of cloud computing services. Cloud computing is being adopted in critical sectors such as energy, transport and finance. This makes cloud computing services critical in themselves. When cyber-attacks and cyber disruptions happen, millions of users are affected. Infrastructure vendors will inevitably take advantage of the benefits offered by the cloud computing environment, but while this may offer improved performance and scalability, the associated security threats deter this progression. There needs to be an assurance that confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data and resources is maintained. This paper provides an overview to the cloud security conundrum, details existing intrusion detection methods, and presents our observation and proposed elastic scaling method for cloud security.

Methods and techniques to support the development of fraud detection system

The volume of fraudulent activity is increasing rapidly, with individuals and organisations being at great risk. This paper inspects the various types of fraud and the use of current systems involved in the detection of fraudulent activities across various business sectors. Through research and comparison of existing systems, this paper aims to develop a new fraud detection system which can be used by organisations, to help them detect potentially fraudulent applications. As more day-to-day tasks become feasible online, the opportunity for fraudsters has increased, therefore presenting difficulty to organisations. The proposed system is used to help determine how fraudulent an applicant is, predetermined from their previous online activity. Use of the fraud detection system can help organisations to build a case profiling their applicants, ensuring only their most trustworthy customers are granted financial facilities.

Simulating Critical Infrastructure Cascading Failure

The reliance on critical infrastructures, which are heavily interconnected, is one of societys greatest weaknesses. An individual failure has the potential to have a huge impact on society and affect other infrastructures. Predicting the effects of a cascading failure is a challenge. In this paper, a simulation of a virtual city is presented in order to visualise the effects of a cascading failure. The simulation is used to assess the resulting effect of a telecommunications failure. Data extracted from the simulation is used to evaluate the impact of the failure on the emergency services provision. Behaviour analysis techniques are used to demonstrate how a failure in one infrastructure can impact another and present a way for organisations to plan for its effects.

Improving the barrier of communication between healthcare professionals and their patients using a Prescription Tracking System

The use of technology is extremely beneficial in terms of efficiency and in the means of supporting patients. The barriers of current communication will be discussed and ideas will be proposed to help improve. There are many challenges in this industry due to the extensive range of audience from the elderly to the young and the fit and healthy to extremely ill patients. Promoting a means of enhanced communication will allow the support of pharmacies to reach their full potential. We propose the development of a Prescription Tracking System that improves upon current offerings, bridging the barriers between healthcare and patient communications.

Distributed Attack Prevention Using Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence

This paper details a robust collaborative intrusion detection methodology for detecting attacks within a Cloud federation. It is a proactive model and the responsibility for managing the elements of the Cloud is distributed among several monitoring nodes. Since there are a wide range of elements to manage, complexity grows proportionally with the size of the Cloud, so a suitable communication and monitoring hierarchy is adopted. Our architecture consists of four major entities: the Cloud Broker, the monitoring nodes, the local coordinator (Super Nodes), and the global coordinator (Command and Control server - C2). Utilising monitoring nodes into our architecture enhances the performance and response time, yet achieves higher accuracy and a broader spectrum of protection. For collaborative intrusion detection, we use the Dempster Shafer theory of evidence via the role of the Cloud Broker. Dempster Shafer executes as a main fusion node, with the role to collect and fuse the information provided by the monitors, taking the final decision regarding a possible attack.

Securing the smart grid: threats and remediation

The implementation of the smart grid brings many improvements over the traditional energy grid by leveraging a vast interconnected infrastructure that allows two way communication and automation throughout the entire grid. A key difference over the existing grid is the introduction of the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) which contains many new components such as the smart meter and the communication gateways. The focus of this paper is to examine the possible effects on the energy supply should these devices become compromised. Smart meters are one of the most important components in the smart grid implementation which allow a real time flow of information to/from the consumer on their energy usage. The paper also discusses how closing coal and oil power plant has increased our demand on gas power stations in the UK. Our experiments show that manipulating smart meter readings can create a massive shortfall in gas provisioning.