Biblio
Cloud computing is widely believed to be the future of computing. It has grown from being a promising idea to one of the fastest research and development paradigms of the computing industry. However, security and privacy concerns represent a significant hindrance to the widespread adoption of cloud computing services. Likewise, the attributes of the cloud such as multi-tenancy, dynamic supply chain, limited visibility of security controls and system complexity, have exacerbated the challenge of assessing cloud risks. In this paper, we conduct a real-world case study to validate the use of a supply chaininclusive risk assessment model in assessing the risks of a multicloud SaaS application. Using the components of the Cloud Supply Chain Cyber Risk Assessment (CSCCRA) model, we show how the model enables cloud service providers (CSPs) to identify critical suppliers, map their supply chain, identify weak security spots within the chain, and analyse the risk of the SaaS application, while also presenting the value of the risk in monetary terms. A key novelty of the CSCCRA model is that it caters for the complexities involved in the delivery of SaaS applications and adapts to the dynamic nature of the cloud, enabling CSPs to conduct risk assessments at a higher frequency, in response to a change in the supply chain.
At the RELENG 2014 Q&A, the question was asked, “What is your greatest concern?” and the response was “someone subverting our deployment pipeline”. That is the motivation for this paper. We explore what it means to subvert a pipeline and provide several different scenarios of subversion. We then focus on the issue of securing a pipeline. As a result, we provide an engineering process that is based on having trusted components mediate access to sensitive portions of the pipeline from other components, which can remain untrusted. Applying our process to a pipeline we constructed involving Chef, Jenkins, Docker, Github, and AWS, we find that some aspects of our process result in easy to make changes to the pipeline, whereas others are more difficult. Consequently, we have developed a design that hardens the pipeline, although it does not yet completely secure it.
The software supply chain is a source of cybersecurity risk for many commercial and government organizations. Public data may be used to inform automated tools for detecting software supply chain risk during continuous integration and deployment. We link data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) with open version control data for the open source project OpenSSL, a widely used secure networking library that made the news when a significant vulnerability, Heartbleed, was discovered in 2014. We apply the Alhazmi-Malaiya Logistic (AML) model for software vulnerability discovery to this case. This model predicts a sigmoid cumulative vulnerability discovery function over time. Some versions of OpenSSL do not conform to the predictions of the model because they contain a temporary plateau in the cumulative vulnerability discovery plot. This temporary plateau feature is an empirical signature of a security failure mode that may be useful in future studies of software supply chain risk.
The Industrial Internet promises to radically change and improve many industry's daily business activities, from simple data collection and processing to context-driven, intelligent and pro-active support of workers' everyday tasks and life. The present paper first provides insight into a typical industrial internet application architecture, then it highlights one fundamental arising contradiction: “Who owns the data is often not capable of analyzing it”. This statement is explained by imaging a visionary data supply chain that would realize some of the Industrial Internet promises. To concretely implement such a system, recent standards published by The Open Group are presented, where we highlight the characteristics that make them suitable for Industrial Internet applications. Finally, we discuss comparable solutions and concludes with new business use cases.
The perception of lack of control over resources deployed in the cloud may represent one of the critical factors for an organization to decide to cloudify or not their own services. Furthermore, in spite of the idea of offering security-as-a-service, the development of secure cloud applications requires security skills that can slow down the adoption of the cloud for nonexpert users. In the recent years, the concept of Security Service Level Agreements (Security SLA) is assuming a key role in the provisioning of cloud resources. This paper presents the SPECS framework, which enables the development of secure cloud applications covered by a Security SLA. The SPECS framework offers APIs to manage the whole Security SLA life cycle and provides all the functionalities needed to automatize the enforcement of proper security mechanisms and to monitor userdefined security features. The development process of SPECS applications offering security-enhanced services is illustrated, presenting as a real-world case study the provisioning of a secure web server.
Security in cloud environments is always considered an issue, due to the lack of control over leased resources. In this paper, we present a solution that offers security-as-a-service by relying on Security Service Level Agreements (Security SLAs) as a means to represent the security features to be granted. In particular, we focus on a security mechanism that is automatically configured and activated in an as-a-service fashion in order to protect cloud resources against DoS attacks. The activities reported in this paper are part of a wider work carried out in the FP7-ICT programme project SPECS, which aims at building a framework offering Security-as-a-Service using an SLA-based approach. The proposed approach founds on the adoption of SPECS Services to negotiate, to enforce and to monitor suitable security metrics, chosen by cloud customers, negotiated with the provider and included in a signed Security SLA.
Food safety policies have aim to promote and develop feeding and nutrition in society. This paper presents a system dynamics model that studies the dynamic behavior between transport infrastructure and the food supply chain in the city of Bogotá. The results show that an adequate transport infrastructure is more effective to improve the service to the customer in the food supply chain. The system dynamics model allows analyze the behavior of transport infrastructure and supply chains of fruits and vegetables, groceries, meat and dairy. The study has gone some way towards enhancing our understanding of food security impact, food supply chain and transport infrastructure.
RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) is attractive for the strong visibility it provides into logistics operations. In this paper, we explore fair-exchange techniques to encourage honest reporting of item receipt in RFID-tagged supply chains and present a fair ownership transfer system for RFID-tagged supply chains. In our system, a receiver can only access the data and/or functions of the RFID tag by providing the sender with a cryptographic attestation of successful receipt; cheating results in a defunct tag. Conversely, the sender can only obtain the receiver's attestation by providing the secret keys required to access the tag.
In this paper, an optimization model of automobile supply chain network with risks under fuzzy price is put forward. The supply chain network is composed of component suppliers, plants, and distribution centers. The total costs of automobile supply chain consist of variable costs, fixed costs, and transportation costs. The objective of this study is to minimize the risks of total profits. In order to deal with this model, this paper puts forward an approximation method to transform a continuous fuzzy problem into discrete fuzzy problem. The model is solved using Cplex 12.6. The results show that Cplex 12.6 can perfectly solve this model, the expected value and lower semi-variance of total profits converge with the increasing number of discretization points, the structure of automobile supply chain network keeps unchanged with the increasing number of discretization points.