Luigi Sgaglione

An OpenNCP-based Solution for Secure eHealth Data Exchange

Abstract The European Commission is very focused on the development of possible solutions to allow effective cross-border healthcare provisioning with the aim of guaranteeing a uniform Quality of Service (QoS) level of healthcare systems across Europe. One of the most relevant efforts in this direction was the epSOS Project, with the release of the OpenNCP platform overcoming interoperability issues in health information exchange between nations while complying with both National and European laws. Despite the OpenNCP platform has been adopted in several Member States, allowing them to securely interconnect their eHealth infrastructures, some security issues are still partially addressed. This work shows how the KONFIDO project will address these issues by building on and extending the results of OpenNCP through a sound holistic approach to security at a systemic level. This paper describes in detail the KONFIDO project approach and how it is being deployed via a combination of complementary security enhancing technologies with the ultimate goal of increasing trust and security of eHealth data exchange.

KONFIDO: An OpenNCP-Based Secure eHealth Data Exchange System

Allowing cross-border health-care data exchange by establishing a uniform QoS level of health-care systems across European states, represents one of the current main goals of the European Commission. For this purpose epSOS project was funded with the objective to overcome interoperability issues in patients health information exchange among European healthcare systems. A main achievement of the project was the OpenNCP platform. Settled over the results of the epSOS project, KONFIDO aims at increasing trust and security of eHealth data exchange by adopting a holistic approach, as well as at increasing awareness of security issues among the healthcare community. In this light, the paper describes the KONFIDO project’s approach and discusses its design and its representation as a system of interacting agents. It finally discusses the deployment of the provided platform.

Cloudifying Critical Applications: A Use Case from the Power Grid Domain

The cloud computing paradigm is gaining more and more momentum, to the extent that it is no more confined to its initial application domains, i.e. use by enterprises and businesses that are simply willing to lower costs or to increase computing capacity in a flexible manner. In particular, increasing interest is recently being paid to the dramatic potentials that the use of cloud computing technology by critical infrastructure (CI) operators might bring about, in terms of benefits for the society at large. Since accidental or deliberate damage to a CI may result in devastating consequences, this mandates for dependable and trustworthy security mechanisms in cloud platforms. In this paper, we present a distributed application for real-time monitoring of a Power Grid. The application, which is called PoGriMon, is deployed on top of the SecureCloud platform, a security-enhanced IaaS solution that exploits the Intel Software Guard eXtension (SGX) technology. PoGriMon has been designed based on the requirements of the SCADA network of the Israeli Electric Corporation (IEC), and it is currently being validated in a realistic setup also provided by IEC.

Addressing Security Issues in the eHeatlh Domain Relying on SIEM Solutions

During the last decade, we witnessed a constantly increasing digitalization in the health-care domain that, while from the one hand, has increased the average life expectancy representing one of the crowning achievements of the last years, from the other hand, has introduced extra challenges due to the simultaneous increasing of the proliferation of cyber-crime and the creation of malicious applications which try to access health sensitive data. This created the need for increased security implementations, leading to improved user acceptance of such applications and thus to large-scale adoption of these technologies and to full exploitation of their advantages. We here propose the use of a SIEM-based framework specifically tailored for a healthcare portal developed within the context of the Italian National Project eHealthNet, which allows real time monitoring of portal accesses with the aim of detecting potential threats and anomalies that could cause major security issues.

IoT and Sensor Networks Security

Abstract This chapter presents a survey about the Internet of Things (IoT). The wide-scale diffusion of the Internet has been the driving force for this emerging trend, namely the use of such global communication infrastructure for enabling machines and smart objects to communicate, cooperate, and take decisions on real word situations. The scope of this survey is to facilitate the first approach to the IoT world. Different visions of this novel paradigm and device constraints are reported and enabling technologies reviewed. IoT Security, Safety, and Privacy risks are presented and analyzed to provide a comprehensive view of current issues due to the adoption of this technology. Furthermore, particular attention is paid to the Wireless Sensor Network, which represents the most used sensors network in many domains such as Smart Home, providing an overview about its main technical challenges, attacks, and related countermeasures.

An Approach for Securing Cloud-Based Wide Area Monitoring of Smart Grid Systems

Computing power and flexibility provided by cloud technologies represent an opportunity for Smart Grid applications, in general, and for Wide Area Monitoring Systems, in particular. Even though the cloud model is considered efficient for Smart Grids, it has stringent constraints in terms of security and reliability. An attack to the integrity or confidentiality of data may have a devastating impact for the system itself and for the surrounding environment. The main security risk is represented by malicious insiders, i.e., malevolent employees having privileged access to the hosting machines. In this paper, we evaluate a powerful hardening approach that could be leveraged to protect synchrophasor data processed at cloud level. In particular, we propose the use of homomorphic encryption to address risks related to malicious insiders. Our goal is to estimate the feasibility of such a security solution by verifying the compliance with frame rate requirements typical of synchrophasor standards.

A GDPR-Compliant Approach to Real-Time Processing of Sensitive Data

Cyber-attacks represent a serious threat to public authorities and their agencies are an attractive target for hackers. The public sector as a whole collects lots of data on its citizens, but that data is often kept on vulnerable systems. Especially for Local Public Administrations (LPAs), protection against cyber-attacks is an extremely relevant issue due to outdated technologies and budget constraints. Furthermore, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) poses many constraints/limitations on the data usage when “special type of data” is processed. In this paper the approach of the EU project COMPACT (H2020) is presented and the solutions used to guarantee the data privacy during the real time monitoring performed by the COMPACT security tools are highlighted.

Efficient Supply Chain Management: Traceability and Transparency

The development of SCM systems is a difficult activity, since it involves integrating critical business flows both within and among participating companies. The inherently difficulty of the problem is exacerbated by the business constraint (that almost invariably applies in the real world) that the investments made by individual companies throughout the years must be preserved. This maps to major design constraints, since SCM systems must be built around the preexisting ICT infrastructures of the individual companies and – also importantly – without affecting the local policies. We propose a federation-based approach to seamless and effective integration of legacy enterprise information systems into a unified SCM system. The proposed solution is implemented using a combination of Open Source BPM and cloud computing platform, and validated with respect to a real world use case taken from a research activity (namely: the GLOB-ID project) conducted cooperatively by academic and industrial parties.

Data Collection Framework

The data collection for eventual analysis is an old concept that today receives a revisited interest due to the emerging of new research trend such Big Data. Furthermore, considering that a current market trend is to provide integrated solution to achieve multiple purposes (such as ISOC, SIEM, CEP, etc.), the data became very heterogeneous. In this paper a flexible and efficient solution about the data collection of heterogeneous data is presented, describing the approach used to collect heterogeneous data and the additional features (pre-processing) provided with it.

A Multi-sensor Data Fusion Approach for Detecting Direct Debit Frauds

Electronic payment systems have always represented an attractive target for cyber criminals. In this context the Single Euro Payments Area Direct Debit (SDD) service is gaining more and more importance since it has been promoted by the European banking industry as an innovative payment infrastructure. This service allows to perform electronic payments across the Euro zone as simple as domestic payments currently are. This schema facilitates the access to new markets by enterprises and reduces the overall cost to move capitals in Europe, but the other side of the coin is that it is the only financial system that has recorded an increase in the number of frauds, as highlighted by European Central Bank in a report dated 2015. In this paper SDD service attack patterns are analysed and a SDD fraud detection system based on multi-sensor data fusion is presented. Specifically, the Dempster-Shafer Theory is used in the proposed system to correlate security-relevant data from multiple information sources in order to detect anomalous behaviours that could be the evidence of an ongoing SDD fraud.