scholarly journals A Review of Cyber-Ranges and Test-Beds: Current and Future Trends

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (24) ◽  
pp. 7148
Author(s):  
Elochukwu Ukwandu ◽  
Mohamed Amine Ben Farah ◽  
Hanan Hindy ◽  
David Brosset ◽  
Dimitris Kavallieros ◽  
...  

Cyber situational awareness has been proven to be of value in forming a comprehensive understanding of threats and vulnerabilities within organisations, as the degree of exposure is governed by the prevailing levels of cyber-hygiene and established processes. A more accurate assessment of the security provision informs on the most vulnerable environments that necessitate more diligent management. The rapid proliferation in the automation of cyber-attacks is reducing the gap between information and operational technologies and the need to review the current levels of robustness against new sophisticated cyber-attacks, trends, technologies and mitigation countermeasures has become pressing. A deeper characterisation is also the basis with which to predict future vulnerabilities in turn guiding the most appropriate deployment technologies. Thus, refreshing established practices and the scope of the training to support the decision making of users and operators. The foundation of the training provision is the use of Cyber-Ranges (CRs) and Test-Beds (TBs), platforms/tools that help inculcate a deeper understanding of the evolution of an attack and the methodology to deploy the most impactful countermeasures to arrest breaches. In this paper, an evaluation of documented CRs and TBs platforms is evaluated. CRs and TBs are segmented by type, technology, threat scenarios, applications and the scope of attainable training. To enrich the analysis of documented CRs and TBs research and cap the study, a taxonomy is developed to provide a broader comprehension of the future of CRs and TBs. The taxonomy elaborates on the CRs/TBs dimensions, as well as, highlighting a diminishing differentiation between application areas.

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jouni Pöyhönen ◽  
Jyri Rajamäki ◽  
Harri Ruoslahti ◽  
Martti Lehto

The European Union promotes collaboration between authorities and the private sector, and the providers of the most critical services to society face security related obligations. In this paper, critical infrastructure is seen as a system of systems that can be subject to cyber-attacks and  other disturbances. Situational awareness (SA) enhances preparations for and decision-making during assessed and unforeseen disruptive incidents, and promoting Cyber effective situational  awareness (CSA) requires information sharing between the different interest groups. This research is constructive in nature, where innovative constructions developed as solutions  for domain-specific real world problems, while the research question is: “How can cyber  situational awareness protect critical infrastructures?” The Observe – Orient – Decide – Act (OODA) loop is examined as a way to promote  collaboration towards a shared situational picture, awareness and understanding to meet challenges of forming CSA in relation to risk assessment (RA) and improving resilience. Three levels of organizational decision-making are examined in relation a five-layer cyber structure of an organization to provide a more comprehensive systems view of organizational cyber security. Successful, crisis-management efforts enable organizations to sustain and resume operations, minimize losses, and adapt to manage future incidents, as many critical infrastructures typically lack resilience and may easily lose essential functionality when hit by an adverse event. Situation awareness is the main prerequisite towards cyber security. Without situation awareness, it is impossible to systematically prevent, identify, and protect the system from cyber incidents.


2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 46-82
Author(s):  
Fathi Malkawi

This paper addresses some of the Muslim community’s concerns regarding its children’s education and reflects upon how education has shaped the position of other communities in American history. It argues that the future of Muslim education will be influenced directly by the present realities and future trends within American education in general, and, more importantly, by the well-calculated and informed short-term and long-term decisions and future plans taken by the Muslim community. The paper identifies some areas in which a wellestablished knowledge base is critical to making decisions, and calls for serious research to be undertaken to furnish this base.


Author(s):  
Isabel Cepeda ◽  
Pedro Fraile Balbín

ABSTRACT This paper explores Alexis de Tocqueville's thought on fiscal political economy as a forerunner of the modern school of preference falsification and rational irrationality in economic decision making. A good part of the literature has misrepresented Tocqueville as an unconditional optimist regarding the future of fiscal moderation under democracy. Yet, although he initially shared the cautious optimism of most classical economists with respect to taxes under extended suffrage, Tocqueville's view turned more pessimistic in the second volume of his Democracy in America. Universal enfranchisement and democratic governments would lead to higher taxes, more intense income redistribution and government control. Under democracy, the continuous search for unconditional equality would eventually jeopardise liberty and economic growth.


Author(s):  
Joelle H. Fong ◽  
Jackie Li

Abstract This paper examines the impact of uncertainties in the future trends of mortality on annuity values in Singapore's compulsory purchase market. We document persistent population mortality improvement trends over the past few decades, which underscores the importance of longevity risk in this market. Using the money's worth framework, we find that the life annuities delivered expected payouts valued at 1.019–1.185 (0.973–1.170) per dollar of annuity premium for males (females). Even in a low mortality improvement scenario, the annuities provide an expected value exceeding 0.950. This suggests that participants in the national annuity pool have access to attractively priced annuities, regardless of sex, product, and premium invested.


Author(s):  
Leonardo B. Furstenau ◽  
Bruna Rabaioli ◽  
Michele Kremer Sott ◽  
Danielli Cossul ◽  
Mariluza Sott Bender ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of society. Researchers worldwide have been working to provide new solutions to and better understanding of this coronavirus. In this research, our goal was to perform a Bibliometric Network Analysis (BNA) to investigate the strategic themes, thematic evolution structure and trends of coronavirus during the first eight months of COVID-19 in the Web of Science (WoS) database in 2020. To do this, 14,802 articles were analyzed, with the support of the SciMAT software. This analysis highlights 24 themes, of which 11 of the more important ones were discussed in-depth. The thematic evolution structure shows how the themes are evolving over time, and the most developed and future trends of coronavirus with focus on COVID-19 were visually depicted. The results of the strategic diagram highlight ‘CHLOROQUINE’, ‘ANXIETY’, ‘PREGNANCY’ and ‘ACUTE-RESPIRATORY-SYNDROME’, among others, as the clusters with the highest number of associated citations. The thematic evolution. structure presented two thematic areas: “Damage prevention and containment of COVID-19” and “Comorbidities and diseases caused by COVID-19”, which provides new perspectives and futures trends of the field. These results will form the basis for future research and guide decision-making in coronavirus focused on COVID-19 research and treatments.


Computation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Evangelos Maltezos ◽  
Athanasios Douklias ◽  
Aris Dadoukis ◽  
Fay Misichroni ◽  
Lazaros Karagiannidis ◽  
...  

Situational awareness is a critical aspect of the decision-making process in emergency response and civil protection and requires the availability of up-to-date information on the current situation. In this context, the related research should not only encompass developing innovative single solutions for (real-time) data collection, but also on the aspect of transforming data into information so that the latter can be considered as a basis for action and decision making. Unmanned systems (UxV) as data acquisition platforms and autonomous or semi-autonomous measurement instruments have become attractive for many applications in emergency operations. This paper proposes a multipurpose situational awareness platform by exploiting advanced on-board processing capabilities and efficient computer vision, image processing, and machine learning techniques. The main pillars of the proposed platform are: (1) a modular architecture that exploits unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and terrestrial assets; (2) deployment of on-board data capturing and processing; (3) provision of geolocalized object detection and tracking events; and (4) a user-friendly operational interface for standalone deployment and seamless integration with external systems. Experimental results are provided using RGB and thermal video datasets and applying novel object detection and tracking algorithms. The results show the utility and the potential of the proposed platform, and future directions for extension and optimization are presented.


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