The development of systems based on embedded components is a challenging task because of their distributed, reactive and real-time nature. From a security point of view, embedded devices are basically systems owned by a certain entity, used frequently as part of systems owned by other entities and operated in a potentially hostile environment. The development of security-enhanced systems of embedded components is a difficult task due to different types of threats that may affect such systems, and because the security in systems of embedded devices is currently added as an additional feature when the development is advanced, or avoided as a superfluous characteristic. We present in this paper a methodology for the analysis and modeling of threats and attacks for systems of embedded components. The Intruder Model allows us to describe possible actions a potential intruder can accomplish, depending on his/her capabilities, resources, etc. Using this information, we can define a Threat Model that will specify the threats and attacks that affect different security properties in specific domains.

Security is considered one of the crucial issues for the widespread adoption of cloud computing. Despite all research done in preventive security for cloud computing, the high complexity and the interdependence of many software layers and infrastructures mean that in practice there are always chances for something going wrong. For this reason, there is a need to complement preventive security measures with reactive measures. Among these, monitoring is the most relevant approach. In this paper, we introduce a new and robust architecture for dynamic security monitoring and enforcement specially designed for cloud computing scenarios. Our solution is therefore a complete one including a three-layered architecture, a new language for expressing monitoring rules and a strategy based on the generation of a finite-state machine to improve the performance of the monitoring engine.

Recognizing that information from different sources refers to the same (real world) entity is a crucial challenge in instance-level information integration, as it is a pre-requisite for combining the information about one entity from different sources. The required entity matching is time consuming and thus imposes a crucial limit for large-scale, dynamic information integration. An increased re-use of entity identifiers (or names) across different information collections such as RDF repositories, databases and document collections, eases this situation.In the ideal case, entity matching can be reduced to the trivial problem of spotting the same entity identifier in different information collections. In this paper we propose the use of an entity name system (ENS) - as it is currently under development in the EU-funded project OKKAM - for systematically supporting the re-use of entity identifiers. The main purpose of the ENS is to provide unique and uniform names for entities for the use in information collections, so that the same name is used for an entity, even when it is referenced in different contexts. Of course the creation of an ENS that can efficiently deal with entities on the Web scale raises scalability issues of its own. This paper focuses on the role of an ENS in contributing to the scalability of ad-hoc and on demand information integration tasks.