Peter Bloodsworth

Semantic security against web application attacks

In this paper, we propose a method of detecting and classifying web application attacks. In contrast to current signature-based security methods, our solution is an ontology based technique. It specifies web application attacks by using semantic rules, the context of consequence and the specifications of application protocols. The system is capable of detecting sophisticated attacks effectively and efficiently by analyzing the specified portion of a user request where attacks are possible. Semantic rules help to capture the context of the application, possible attacks and the protocol that was used. These rules also allow inference to run over the ontological models in order to detect, the often complex polymorphic variations of web application attacks. The ontological model was developed using Description Logic that was based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The inference rules are Horn Logic statements and are implemented using the Apache JENA framework. The system is therefore platform and technology independent. Prior to the evaluation of the system the knowledge model was validated by using OntoClean to remove inconsistency, incompleteness and redundancy in the specification of ontological concepts. The experimental results show that the detection capability and performance of our system is significantly better than existing state of the art solutions. The system successfully detects web application attacks whilst generating few false positives. The examples that are presented demonstrate that a semantic approach can be used to effectively detect zero day and more sophisticated attacks in a real-world environment.

The Requirements for Ontologies in Medical Data Integration: A Case Study

Evidence-based medicine is critically dependent on three sources of information: a medical knowledge base, the patients medical record and knowledge of available resources, including where appropriate, clinical protocols. Patient data is often scattered in a variety of databases and may, in a distributed model, be held across several disparate repositories. Consequently addressing the needs of an evidence- based medicine community presents issues of biomedical data integration, clinical interpretation and knowledge management. This paper outlines how the Health-e-Child project has approached the challenge of requirements specification for (bio-) medical data integration, from the level of cellular data, through disease to that of patient and population. The approach is illuminated through the requirements elicitation and analysis of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), one of three diseases being studied in the EC-funded Health- e-Child project.

Providing traceability for neuroimaging analyses.

INTRODUCTION With the increasingly digital nature of biomedical data and as the complexity of analyses in medical research increases, the need for accurate information capture, traceability and accessibility has become crucial to medical researchers in the pursuance of their research goals. Grid- or Cloud-based technologies, often based on so-called Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), are increasingly being seen as viable solutions for managing distributed data and algorithms in the bio-medical domain. For neuroscientific analyses, especially those centred on complex image analysis, traceability of processes and datasets is essential but up to now this has not been captured in a manner that facilitates collaborative study. PURPOSE AND METHOD Few examples exist, of deployed medical systems based on Grids that provide the traceability of research data needed to facilitate complex analyses and none have been evaluated in practice. Over the past decade, we have been working with mammographers, paediatricians and neuroscientists in three generations of projects to provide the data management and provenance services now required for 21st century medical research. This paper outlines the finding of a requirements study and a resulting system architecture for the production of services to support neuroscientific studies of biomarkers for Alzheimers disease. RESULTS The paper proposes a software infrastructure and services that provide the foundation for such support. It introduces the use of the CRISTAL software to provide provenance management as one of a number of services delivered on a SOA, deployed to manage neuroimaging projects that have been studying biomarkers for Alzheimers disease. CONCLUSIONS In the neuGRID and N4U projects a Provenance Service has been delivered that captures and reconstructs the workflow information needed to facilitate researchers in conducting neuroimaging analyses. The software enables neuroscientists to track the evolution of workflows and datasets. It also tracks the outcomes of various analyses and provides provenance traceability throughout the lifecycle of their studies. As the Provenance Service has been designed to be generic it can be applied across the medical domain as a reusable tool for supporting medical researchers thus providing communities of researchers for the first time with the necessary tools to conduct widely distributed collaborative programmes of medical analysis.

Social Networking for Sharing Cloud Resources

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, ubiquitous and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. storage, applications, and networks) that can be provisioned with minimal management effort. Despite all these benefits, the sharing of resources with other users is a challenge, cloud providers do not commonly facilitate users in sharing their dedicated resources with others. In developing countries it is often too expensive for people to acquire a virtual machine of their own. Users may therefore wish to manage costs and increase computational resource usage by sharing their instances with others. Sadly it is not easy to do this at present. Social networks provide a structure that allows users to interact and share resources (e.g. pictures and videos) on the basis of a trustworthy relationship (e.g. Friendship). This paper highlights a Cloud Resource Bartering model (CRB-model) for sharing users computational resources through a social network. In our approach we have linked a social network with the computational cloud to create a social cloud (SC) so that users can share their part of the cloud with their social community. A prototype system has been deployed on a social network by using the bartering resource trading mechanism. It is anticipated that this may help users to share their dedicated resources without the need for money changing hands and different communities.

Cloud Market Maker

Cloud providers commonly incur heavy upfront set up costs which remain almost constant whether they serve a single or many customers. In order to generate a return on this investment, a suitable pricing strategy is required by providers. Established industries such as the airlines employ dynamic pricing to maximize their revenues. In order to increase their resource utilization rates, cloud providers could also use dynamic pricing for their services. At present however most providers use static schemes for pricing their resources. This work presents a new dynamic pricing mechanism for cloud providers. Furthermore, at present no platform exists that provides a dynamic unified view of the different cloud offerings in real-time. Due to a rapidly changing landscape and a limited knowledge of the cloud marketplace, consumers can often end up choosing a cloud provider that is more expensive or does not give them what they really need. This is because some providers spend significantly on advertising their services online. In order to assist cloud customers in the selection of a suitable resource and cloud providers in implementing dynamic pricing, this work describes an automated dynamic pricing marketplace and a decision support system for cloud users. We present a multi-agent multi-auction based system through which such services are delivered. An evaluation has been carried out to determine how effectively the Cloud Market Maker selects the resource, dynamically adjusts the price for the cloud users and the suitability of dynamic pricing for the cloud environment. This paper presents Cloud Market Maker (CMM); a marketplace for cloud users.The system provides a dynamic pricing marketplace for providers to maximize their revenue.It provides users with decision support when choosing a cloud resource.It employs a multi-agent multi-auction approach for creating an automated marketplace for cloud users which were not possible with other existing systems.

Intelligent grid enabled services for neuroimaging analysis

This paper reports our work in the context of the neuGRID project in the development of intelligent services for a robust and efficient Neuroimaging analysis environment. neuGRID is an EC-funded project driven by the needs of the Alzheimers disease research community that aims to facilitate the collection and archiving of large amounts of imaging data coupled with a set of services and algorithms. By taking Alzheimers disease as an exemplar, the neuGRID project has developed a set of intelligent services and a Grid infrastructure to enable the European neuroscience community to carry out research required for the study of degenerative brain diseases. We have investigated the use of machine learning approaches, especially evolutionary multi-objective meta-heuristics for optimising scientific analysis on distributed infrastructures. The salient features of the services and the functionality of a planning and execution architecture based on an evolutionary multi-objective meta-heuristics to achieve analysis efficiency are presented. We also describe implementation details of the services that will form an intelligent analysis environment and present results on the optimisation that has been achieved as a result of this investigation.

Semantic Matching Using the UMLS

Traditional ontology alignment techniques enable equivalence relationships to be established between concepts in two ontologies with some confidence value. With semantic matching, however, it is possible to identify not only equivalence (***) relationships between concepts, but less general (

Elastic JADE: Dynamically Scalable Multi Agents Using Cloud Resources

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SOA compliant FIPA agent communication language

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A Generic Model for Distributed Real-Time Scheduling Based on Dynamic Heterogeneous Data

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