The path to the Digital Decade in Europe is realized by various governance and regulatory frameworks that aim to materialize this core European strategy. The EU cybersecurity strategy projects to safeguard this path and enable a swift but smooth transition. Arguably, EU is constantly taking actions to address cybersecurity challenges and promote cyber resilience, focusing primarily in critical sectors such as energy. This imposes significant challenges for the cybersecurity technology providers and requires a flexible, adaptive and agile design and development approach. The presented work is an evolution of the ARES2021 paper “Pan-European Cybersecurity Incidents Information Sharing Platform to support NIS Directive” that further aligns with advancements in the European Cybersecurity policy and regulations landscape. This is feasible since the development of the Incidents Information Sharing Platform (I2SP) is agile, adaptive and has continuously been driven by the advancements observed and imposed by the European cybersecurity regulatory framework. The current work showcases the I2SP design enhancements to address the latest EU cybersecurity regulatory framework updates relating to the Network Code on Cybersecurity (NCCS), NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act, highlighting the stringent alignment between I2SP and the EU cybersecurity strategy.

The energy sector has been, in recent years, the target of sophisticated cyberattacks. Although the importance of collaborative cyber-security consciousness, expressed as extensive cyber threat intelligence sharing, is undoubted, the standardization of the means of exchanging cyber threat information efficiently and securely has been inadequately addressed and is mostly expressed by the emergence of the Trusted Automated eXchange of Indicator Information (TAXIITM) protocol which faces major deficiencies when it comes to data integrity assurance and suitability for event-driven architectures. This paper presents a novel approach enabling secure and real-time exchange of cyber threat information, by extending the technological capacity of the TAXII framework and addressing its deficiencies through the integration of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and a generalized publish-subscribe middleware. The applicability of the proposed solution has been validated in several use cases addressing the real needs of Electrical Power and Energy Systems.

Cybersecurity in the Energy sector and relevant information sharing is at the foremost of European strategy towards the digital decade targeted by the EC for the years to come. The proposed Pan-European Incidents Information Sharing Platform (I2SP) offers a cyber-shield armour to European Electrical Power and Energy Systems (EPES) enabling cooperative detection of large scale, cyber-human security and privacy incidents and attacks. Via Incidents Information Sharing Platform, early detection and appropriate mitigation, guarantees the continuity of operations and minimization of cascading effects in the infrastructure itself, the environment, the citizens and the end-users.The Incidents’ Information Sharing Platform (I2SP) constitutes the software package which enables secure Cyber-Threat Intelligence (CTI) information sharing among EPES participants, as well as with trusted nominated entities, such as Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) and Security Operations Centers (SOC). I2SP facilitates technical information sharing in view of a warning system and incident reporting across the EU, aligning with the pillars of the new Network Code on Cybersecurity.

Cash management across a network of ATMs can be greatly improved, exploiting a multitude of information sources, which however generate huge datasets, not possible to be analysed via traditional methods. Business Intelligence in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector can be even more challenging when exploitation of real-time information streams is desired. This paper presents the uCash ATM cash management system, running on top of CloudDBAppliance, supporting fast analytics over historical data, as well as streaming analytics functionalities over real-time data, served by its Operational Database. The paper discussed integration points with the platform and provides integration hints, thus constituting a real use case example of the CloudDBAppliance platform, allowing for its further exploitation in various application domains.

Current partially or even no automated in-hospital processes often allow unacceptable errors to occur, the effects of which may span from simple injury to mortality. Recent advances in the Internet of Things, smart tags and cloud technologies may decisively alter this fact and minimize such "never events". In this paper, MATISSE is presented as a smart hospital ecosystem, aiming to decisively decrease "never events" in the hospital value chain. Real-time drugs/pills lifetime/aptness verification and medication administration, patients' identification and association with drugs and medical exams, as well as real-time quality assessment are supported in the proposed ecosystem. The ecosystem leverages the exploitation of information lying in (dynamic) smart tags attached to physical and virtual entities of the ecosystem, as well as the integration of a smart medication cart. The paper presents the supported use cases and the architectural design of the proposed solution, while it provides insights in both the hardware and software assembly of the smart medication cart.

The increasing demand for highly sophisticated cloud services and the consequent worldwide increase in the number of data centers (DC), make the need for energy efficient operation of DCs more actual than ever. Additionally, in the context of smart city and smart grid integration, flexible DCs can play a key role toward acting as grid-stabilization factors. In this paper, a review of the available techniques toward energy-efficient DC operation is performed. The available techniques give rise to four axes of flexibility within a federated DC network. Next, the applicability of the flexible, energy-efficient DC operation is highlighted, by proposing a simple scheduling algorithm, applicable to legacy DC equipment, for effective host and re-arrangement of the DC computing load. The proposed algorithm can provide substantial energy savings during periods of low computing load and improved Quality of Service during periods of high computing load. Concluding, the paper focuses on the grid-stabilization aspects of a federated DC network and the interoperability with the energy network via an Electronic Energy Marketplace in the context of a Smart City.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) often need to operate under strict requirements on energy consumption and be capable of self-adapting to the presence of non-trusted nodes which do not fully cooperate in the packet forwarding operation. In such an environment, the mechanism employed for the calculation of routing paths of minimum cost in terms of the number of transmissions executed for the reliable communication between the data source and the data sink is essential to prevent unnecessary nodes' energy depletion and help prolong the network's lifetime. In this paper, we study a routing metric, TXPFI, that captures the expected number of frame transmissions - including retransmissions - needed for the successful delivery of data from the source to the destination in the presence of malicious nodes and lossy links, and validate its applicability to the IETF RPL routing protocol. Through extensive simulations we evaluate the capability of TXPFI to compute routing paths of minimum transmission count and compare it against a number of metrics suitable for transmission count-efficient and trust-aware routing in WSNs. The results show that the use of TXPFI in RPL can lead to significant transmission count savings.