Recent advancements of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have made it a part of almost every domain of everyday life, including the power grid, leading to what is known as the Smart Grid. But the power grid, a critical economic and social infrastructure, is vulnerable to security threats stemming from the use of ICT and to new emerging vulnerabilities and privacy issues. Access control is a fundamental element of the security infrastructure, as, ideally, the principle of less privilege, zero-trust, segregation of duties, and other best practices should be applied without disrupting the functioning of the power grid while also properly maintaining the security of the Smart Grid. The paper presents the work undertaken in the SealedGRID project and the steps taken for implementing Attribute-based Access Control policies specifically tailored to the Smart Grid.

Recent advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) have improved the power grid, leading to what is known as the smart grid, which, as part of a critical economic and social infrastructure, is vulnerable to security threats from the use of ICT and new emerging vulnerabilities and privacy issues. Access control is a fundamental element of a security infrastructure, and security is based on the principles of less privilege, zero-trust, and segregation of duties. This work addresses how access control can be applied without disrupting the power grid’s functioning while also properly maintaining the security, scalability, and interoperability of the smart grid. The authentication in the platform presumes digital certificates using a web of trust. This paper presents the findings of the SealedGRID project, and the steps taken for implementing Attribute-based access control policies specifically customized to the smart grid. The outcome is to develop a novel, hierarchical architecture composed of different licensing entities that manages access to resources within the network infrastructure. They are based on well-drawn policy rules and the security side of these resources is placed through a context awareness module. Together with this technology, the IoT is used with Big Data (facilitating easy handling of large databases). Another goal of this paper is to present implementation and evaluations details of a secure and scalable security platform for the smart grid.

This paper presents how a Smart Grid system is secured and how blockchain implementation provides confidentiality and integrity for such a system. One main issue that has to be addressed in smart grid systems is databases security. Blockchain has been proven to be a safe alternative to be used in mining systems because it allows a secure applicability in databases. Another important feature is that each hash in a crypto mining system cannot be changed if it has such an algorithm behind its build, thus resulting in a secure and reliable system. This paper aims to show how blockchain can affect and be used in a smart power management system going forth from the SealedGRID platform. This system enables the user to monitor in real time the power usage in a smart grid system, therefore, this platform being built with security and resilience against attacks in mind.

Wireless low-power, multi-hop networks are exposed to numerous attacks also due to their resource-constraints. While there has been a lot of work on intrusion detection systems for such networks, most of these studies have considered only a few topologies, scenarios and attacks. One of the reasons for this shortcoming is the lack of sufficient data traces that are required to train many machine learning algorithms. In contrast to other wireless networks, multi-hop networks do not contain one entity that can capture all the traffic which makes it more difficult to acquire such traces. In this paper we present Multi-Trace. Multi-Trace extends the Cooja simulator with multi-level tracing facilities that enable data logging at different levels while maintaining a global time. We discuss the opportunities that traces generated by Multi-Trace enable for researchers interested in input for their machine learning algorithms. We present experiments that show the efficiency with which Multi-Trace generates traces. We expect Multi-Trace to be a useful tool for the research community.

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Hospitals are responsible for delivering healthcare services to patients in need. These services are large and complex and get affected by multiple interacting actors, such as doctors, nurses, patients, citizens, medical suppliers, health insurance providers. Lately, hospitals around the world are one of the main targets when it comes to terrorist attacks, the cyber realm being the principal source. The healthcare sector is particularly vulnerable due to heavy involvement in patient personal and health information, time constraints, and complex day-to-day operations. In addition to cyber-threats, physical threats are increasingly growing and even healthcare facilities are not immune to them. Malicious intended people created cyber threatening attacks with the purpose to systematically collect evidence against the healthcare system, to advocate for the end of such attacks, and to endanger people's lives or to use the stolen personal data for bad intended actions. Henceforth it is necessary to build a platform that will get alerts and incidents at a fast pace in real-time to prevent any casualties at low cost. SAFECARE project aims to offer protection to hospitals and increase the compliance for the European regulations and security regarding ethics and privacy for health services. This paper presents a solution that will enhance security in hospitals. The primary platform will be built based on a BTMS (Building Threat Monitoring System) where events, incidents, and alerts will be transmitted by sensors from hospital rooms in real-time. Several scenarios were thought to simulate different types of attacks against hospitals and according to the scenarios, various prototypes will be built for assuring the security of the personal and patients from various hospitals.

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