Massimo Villari

Reservoir - When One Cloud Is Not Enough

As cloud computing becomes more predominant, the problem of scalability has become critical for cloud computing providers. The cloud paradigm is attractive because it offers a dramatic reduction in capital and operation expenses for consumers.

Security and Cloud Computing: InterCloud Identity Management Infrastructure

Cloud Computing is becoming one of the most important topics in the IT world. Several challenges are being raised from the adoption of this computational paradigm including security, privacy, and federation. This paper aims to introduce new concepts in cloud computing and security, focusing on heterogeneous and federated scenarios. We present a reference architecture able to address the Identity Management (IdM) problem in the InterCloud context and show how it can be successfully applied to manage the authentication needed among clouds for the federation establishment.

Three-Phase Cross-Cloud Federation Model: The Cloud SSO Authentication

Cloud federation aims to cost-effective assets and resources optimization among heterogeneous environments where clouds can cooperate together with the goal of obtaining unbounded computation resources, hence new business opportunities. This paper describes an architecture for the federation establishment, where clouds that need external resources ask to federated clouds the renting of extra physical resources. Our architecture introduces a new module named Cross-Cloud Federation Manager including three agents (Discovery, Match-making and Authentication). In this work, we specifically focus on the authentication agent, which is responsible for a secure federation. To address such problem we propose a technical solution based on the IdP/SP model along with the SAML technology.

A Monitoring and Audit Logging Architecture for Data Location Compliance in Federated Cloud Infrastructures

Current cloud infrastructures have opaque service offerings where customers cannot monitor the underlying physical infrastructure. This situation raises concerns for meeting compliance obligations by critical business applications with data location constraints that are deployed in a Cloud. When federated cloud infrastructures span across different countries where data can migrate from one country to another, it should be possible for data owners to monitor the location of their data. This paper shows how an existing federated Cloud monitoring infrastructure can be used for data location monitoring without compromising Cloud isolation. In the proposed approach collaboration is required between the cloud infrastructure provider (IP) and the user of the cloud, the service provider (SP): the IP monitors the virtual machines (VM) on the SPs behalf and makes the infrastructure level monitoring information available to him. With the monitoring information the SP can create the audit logs required for compliance auditing. The proposed logging architecture is validated by an e-Government case study with legal data location constraints.

CLEVER: A cloud-enabled virtual environment

A cloud-enabled virtual environment called CLEVER is proposed in this paper. CLEVER simplifies the access management of private/hybrid clouds and provides simple and easily accessible interfaces to interact with different “interconnected” clouds, deploy Virtual Machines and perform load balancing through migration. The concept of interface is also exploited for integrating security, contextualization, VM disk image management and federation functionalities made available from higher level software components. Due to its pluggable design, CLEVER is able to grant high scalability, modularity and flexibility in the middleware architecture, while fault tolerance requirements are also satisfied. A prototype version of CLEVER has been developed to implement and test its main features, as discussed in the final part the paper.

Adding long-term availability, obfuscation, and encryption to multi-cloud storage systems

Nowadays, storage services offer a new way for Cloud providers to do business. This new trend is proved by the number of Cloud storage providers that are continuously appearing on the market. By now, using Cloud storage services is becoming a common practice for end-users. However, the current Cloud storage providers do not offer any guarantees regarding long-term availability and privacy. In fact, data stored in the Cloud could be locked-in, lost, or violated in terms of privacy. In this work, we present an innovative system that on one hand allows end-users to simultaneously rely on different Cloud storage providers in a transparent way and on the other hand to enforce long-term availability, obfuscation, and encryption. Our system is highly reliable, in fact, if a provider is not temporarily or permanently available, end-users continue accessing their data in a secure way. In addition, only the end-users have the full control of the overall security of their data and no sensitive information are disclosed to Cloud storage providers. Several experiments allow us to discuss the performance of our system compared against existing solutions.

Heterogeneous Sensors Become Homogeneous Things in Smart Cities

Smart Cities offer a new approach for optimizing services, reducing costs, simplifying the management of Future Cities, enabling new services for citizens. In the Future Internet initiatives, Sensors Networks assume even more a crucial role, especially for making smarter cities. Sensors, becoming smart, will represent the peripheral elements of a complex future ICT world. However, due to the specific application field, smart sensors are very heterogeneous in terms of communication technologies, sensing features and elaboration capabilities. To overcome issues due to the high heterogeneity in this paper we present a new architecture able to make a dual abstraction of complex sensing infrastructures along with data they collect. An important key of this work is to provide a service at world wide level, that is scalable and flexible. The architecture implementation is based on Sensor Web Enablement standard specifications and makes use of the Contiki Operating System for accomplishing the Internet of Things.

AllJoyn Lambda: An architecture for the management of smart environments in IoT

The increasing number of everyday embedded devices that are interconnected over the Internet leads to the need of new software solutions for managing them in an efficient, scalable, and smart way. In addition, such devices produce a huge amount of information, causing the well known Big Data problem, that need to be stored and processed. This emerging scenario, known as Internet of Things (IoT), raises two main challenges: large-scale smart environments management and Big Data storage/analytics. In this paper, we address both challenges, proposing AllJoyn Lambda, a software solution integrating AllJoyn in the Lambda architecture used for Big Data storage and analytics. In order, to describe how the architecture works, a software prototype integrating the AllJoyn system with MongoDB and Storm is presented and tested, analyzing a “smart home” case of study. Finally, we will focus on how can be possible to manage embedded devices in a smart fashion processing both batch and real-time data.

AIPAC: Automatic IP address configuration in mobile ad hoc networks

We present an innovative protocol for the automatic configuration of the IP address in ad hoc networks. This protocol assigns unique IP address to each node and manages possible duplicate addresses due to the mobility of nodes in the network. It avoids the storage of large amounts of data and makes use of procedures that minimize the number of exchanged packets. The protocol also provides a new mechanism, called Gradual Merging of networks that causes the merging process of networks according to their evolution. Ns2 simulations are carried out to validate and characterize the performance of our proposed approach.

Virtual machine provisioning through satellite communications in federated Cloud environments

Cloud federation offers plenty of new services and business opportunities. However, many advanced services cannot be implemented in the real Cloud market due to several issues that have not been overcome yet. One of these concerns is the transfer of huge amount of data among federated Clouds. This paper aims to overcome such a limitation proposing an approach based on satellite communications. By comparing performance in data delivery on the Internet and satellite systems, it is evident that satellite technologies are enough ripe to be competitive against systems with a wired infrastructure. Thus, we propose to make use of satellite transmission to implement fast delivery of huge amount of data. Through the discussion of a use case, where a WEB TV company offers a streaming service, we show how to practically apply the proposed strategy in a real scenario, specifying the involvement of Cloud providers, Cloud users, satellite companies and end-user clients.