Keywords

1 Introduction

The International Symposia on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS) were started in 1986 in Turkey by Erol Gelenbe, and held in Turkey, France, the USA, the UK, and Poland with proceedings [4, 14,15,16, 38, 57, 58, 60, 112] including a wide range of topics published by Springer.

This ISCIS CyberSecurity 2021 Symposium that was held in Nice, France, as part of this series, specializes for the second time on Cybersecurity following a previous event [45], which is my main research interest [6, 21, 90]. Indeed, Cybersecurity is at the forefront of serious technical issues in Computer Science as we transition to highly inter-dependent cyber-physical systems [76], and the European Union published its recommendation for security and privacy [22]. Furthermore, insecurity in systems and networks and the techniques that are used to defend our systems, are also increasing energy consumption in computer systems and network and their \(CO_2\) impact, and the costs of operating them [27, 46, 86]. Hence energy consumption in mobile network has also received attention [3, 42].

Thus the European Commission funded research projects in this field have significantly increased [1] over recent years and this introduction summarizes related research undertaken throughout Europe and includes five recent EC funded projects:

  • NEMESYS on the cybersecurity of mobile telephone system [5, 52, 53, 82, 101],

  • The project SDK4ED that mainly focused on energy savings [87, 103] but also considered issues of Cybersecurity and Reliability [109].

  • KONFIDO [17, 18, 96, 97] on the security of communications and data transfers for interconnected European national or regional health services,

  • GHOST [8, 11] regarding the security of IoT systems for the home, and the design of secure IoT home gateways,

  • SerIoT on the Cybersecurity of IoT systems [7, 31] with a range of applications in supply chains, smart cities, smart manufacturing, and other areas.

  • IoTAC, which aims at securing IoT networks by strengthening the protection of gateways using novel techniques such as Botnet detection, system wide vulnerability assessment [93, 94], disruptive checkpoints, and assuring the optimization of the massive access to IoT gateways [67, 75].

It also discusses some results from the SDK4ED project concerning the energy efficient handling of system reliability issues through checkpointing [107, 108].

2 Improving the Security of Mobile Telephony

Cybersecurity of mobile telephony is a fundamental societal issue. The related problems are exacerbate by the fact that most mobile phones offer opportunistic connections [84, 85] to WIFI and other wireless networks which are not part of the mobile operators’ core infrastructure. This creates vulnerabilities that need to be monitored on the mobile device itself, which is the motivation for the work in [26, 81].

On the other hand, the work described in [2, 102], concerns a form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the signalling plane of the core mobile network which are caused by malicious software which is deposited in the mobile devices. Related work conducted within the EU NEMESYS project [41, 43, 83] using queueing theoretic methods [25, 34].

Early work on DDoS Attacks [65] had proposed self-aware networks and the Cognitive Packet Network (CPN) [39, 77, 80] to detect and counter-attack against DDoS, by identifying sources of attacks by following upstream the attacking traffic, using CPN’s ACK packets to “drop” attacking traffic at upstream routers [65, 100]. It was also applied to mitigate worm attacks and to deviate user traffic so as to avoid insecure nodes [37, 104, 105]. Related issues include the management of keys [114, 115], and the study and mitigation of signalling storms in mobile telephony [26, 102].

3 Security of the Trans-European Health Informatics Network

Large numbers of travellers from one European country to another sometimes need to access health services in the country they are visiting. These health services are typically based on a national model, or a regional model inside a given country such as Italy. Thus the KONFIDO project addressed the important issue of providing a secure support to European health systems.

The corresponding informatics systems, with their patient data bases are also nationally or regionally based, so that when the medical practitioner in one country or region is required to diagnose and treat a visitor from some other region or country, she/he will need to access the patient’s data remotely. KONFIDO’s aim is to improve the cybersecurity of such systems, while improving also their inter-operability across countries and regions in Europe.

Thus the work in [111] presents an overall view and challenges of the project, while in [98] the authors present an analysis of the corresponding user requirements. Such systems have obvious performance optimization issues which are discussed in [72]. Keeping track of the transactions in such a system through blockchains is suggested in [9].

4 Contributions to the Security of the IoT

To exploit the value that the IoT generated provides requires the protection of privacy and in many cases data will have to be rendered strongly anonymous. It will also require specific security not just for the IoT devices and networks, but also for the IoT data repositories in the Cloud and their access networks. These aspects are complicated by the simplicity of many IoT devices which cannot be integrated in complex distributed communication infrastructures that would require communications to be synchronized or schedules [10, 74].

Thus in [11] an overview of the principles and achievements of the GHOST project are presented, which started in May of 2017 and which ran for three years. The project addressed safe-guarding home IoT environments through appropriate software that can be installed on home IoT gateways, and it also creates a prototype and test-bed using specific equipment from the TELEVES company.

Related to this project, machine learning methods were developed for the detection of network attacks on IoT gateways [8] based on Deep Learning [78, 79, 106] with the Random Neural Network [32, 33, 35, 54] and its extensions [89]. Related to the GHOST project, other recent work discusses the effect and mitigation of attacks on the batteries which supply the power of many light-weight IoT network nodes [55].

The SerIoT project that was started in 2018 [19] also produced valuable results [48]. Its technical scope included SerCPN [29, 30], a specific secure network [49] for managing geographically distributed IoT devices and services using the principles of the Cognitive Packet Network (CPN) tested in several experiments [28, 59, 61, 62, 64]. CPN uses “Smart” Packets (SPs) to search for paths and measure QoS while the network is in operation, via Reinforcement Learning using a Random Neural Network, and based on the QoS Goal pursued by the end user. When an SP reaches its destination, its measurements are returned by an ACK packet to the intermediate nodes of the path that was identified by the SP, and to the end user, providing the QoS offered by the path that the SP travelled. Source nodes receive ACKs and take the decision to switch to the path that offers the best security or quality of service [50, 51, 56, 63].

Extensions with a genetic algorithm [36] was also tested [92]. An interesting development in SerIoT combines energy aware routing [40, 66] and security, and admission control [73]. Adaptive techniques for wireless IoT traffic to achieve better QoS are also found in [68,69,70, 99] and summarized in [20, 91], while the RNN with adaptive approaches was shown to offer opportunities for massive video compression [12, 13], as well as for managing Cloud servers [113]. Such adaptive techniques that support the interaction between security metrics, performance and energy consumption were also discussed in a paper in this volume [71].

The subsequent IoTAC project has lead to incremental techniques for learning from user traffic and then testing for an attack as described in [95]. In IoTAC, there was also substantial work on dealing with severe performance issues due to the large flows of IoT packets towards gateways from thousands of IoT devices, so that the resulting Massive Access Problem (MAP) has to be mitigated with novel traffic shaping techniques [47].

5 Conclusions

The existence of frequent and effective cyberattacks on public networks and information technology infrastructures motivates education and research on Cybersecurity. The field that started with the need to encrypt data and create secure systems through strong means for security such as passwords, authentication schemes, firewalls and cryptographic keys, has now substantially evolved towards the detection and mitigation of cyberattacks. In addition issues with respect to software’s own specific vulnerabilities [23] and the need to detect and mitigate such properties has also become important [23, 24, 44, 88, 109, 110].

Indeed, we now realize that hoping to use static means of defence in Cybersecurity is largely ineffective unless it is accompanied by real-time techniques that rapidly react to possible malicious actions or attempts to attack a system.

Thus the field of Cybersecurity research has now entered a far broader phase with much more substantial activity. Its support through several European Union research programs demonstrates a new level of maturity that attempts to attain higher levels of performance and effectiveness through self-adaptation and system reconfiguration .