The Cisco Packet Tracer (CPT) is a network and IoT systems design and simulation tool developed by Cisco Systems inc. The tool is widely used in academia and the industry to develop and simulate complex IoT systems for training purposes. Although the graphical notations of CPT are appealing to system developers, the tool does not support formal verification. Therefore, CPT is limited when it comes to the design and development of safety and secutiry critical IoT systems where faults can endanger people’s lives or damage properties and businesses. This paper proposes a formal approach to the verification of IoT system models designed in the CPT tool, based on the Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA). First, the graphical notations of CPT are mapped to processes in CCA that specify their behaviours. Then any desired property of a system can be specified as a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula. Finally, the CCA Runtime Verification tool ccaRV is used to verify formally whether the behaviour of an IoT system model designed in CPT violates the system’s requirements. The pragmatics of the proposed approach is illustrated using a case study.

The cost and lack of flexibility of health care systems represent a major obstacle for the elderly and poor citizens. The current technologies are reserved for hospitals and large clinics in the developed countries have high costs and maintenance. Therefore, it is necessary to bring health monitoring closer to the patients and healthcare providers in a cost-effective way. This study aims to build a platform that is ready to expand to use all the sensors to predict illnesses and conditions in hospitals and homes. The system is based on two Arduino Uno microcontroller units (MCU), environmental sensors, health sensors (MySignals), and Arduino IDE. Fuzzy Logic is used to push and pull data from the cloud to mobile and web visualization plus an alert system. This study tested 15 sensors in both health and ambient environments the integration of both groups of sensors can produce more accurate predictions. In addition, metrics will be used to decide the range of readings that are industry-specific for each sensor.

Cyber Security Academic Startup Programme (Cyber Asap) provides academics with the expertise, knowledge and training needed to convert their research into technologies, products and services. Due to the fast development of digital technologies, data security and privacy became an active research topic. However, we do not have business plan templates for data security and privacy. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a business plan for data security and privacy technologies, which can help the data security and privacy research out of the university lab and into the commercial market. In this study, technical and non-technical risks and related contingency plans will be addressed through consideration of risk management and secure system architecture.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the industrial de-facto standard for designing systems. It has been used widely in many industrial applications. However, the lack of formal semantics for UML makes it unsuitable for formal verification. As such, UML is limited when it comes to the design of safety/security critical systems where faults can cause damages to people, properties, or the environment. This paper proposes an attempt to define a formal semantics for the UML activity diagrams. An algorithm is proposed that translates an activity diagram into a process in a Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA). This process can then be formally analysed using the tool support for CCA. Hence, errors can be detected and fixed early during the system development life-cycle. The pragmatics of the proposed approach is demonstrated using a case study in e-commerce.

This paper proposes an approach to analysing and verifying Petri nets using a Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA). We propose an algorithm that transforms a Petri net into a CCA process, which can then be analysed and verified using the CCA verification tools. Besides, this demonstrates that CCA is at least as expressive as Petri nets. We illustrate the practicality of our approach using a case study of the dining cryptographers problem.

Purpose This study is an exploration of areas pertaining to the use of production data in non-production environments. During the software development life cycle, non-production environments are used to serve various purposes to include unit, component, integration, system, user acceptance, performance and configuration testing. Organisations and third parties have been and are continuing to use copies of production data in non-production environments. This can lead to personal and sensitive data being accidentally leaked if appropriate and rigorous security guidelines are not implemented. This paper aims to propose a comprehensive framework for minimising data leakage from non-production environments. The framework was evaluated using guided interviews and was proven effective in helping organisation manage sensitive data in non-production environments. Design/methodology/approach Authors conducted a thorough literature review on areas related to data leakage from non-production systems. By doing an analysis of advice, guidelines and frameworks that aims at finding a practical solution for selecting and implementing a de-identification solution of sensitive data, the authors managed to highlight the importance of all areas related to sensitive data protection. Based on these areas, a framework was proposed which was evaluated by conducting set of guided interviews. Findings This paper has researched the background information and produced a framework for an organisation to manage sensitive data in its non-production environments. This paper presents a proposed framework that describes a process flow from the legal and regulatory requirements to data treatment and protection, gained through understanding the organisation’s business, the production system, the purpose and the requirements of the non-production environment. The paper shows that there is some conflict between security and perceived usability, which may be addressed by challenging the perceptions of usability or identifying the compromise required. Non-production environments need not be the sole responsibility of the IT section, they should be of interest to the business area that is responsible for the data held. Originality/value This paper proposes a simplified business model and framework. The proposed model diagrammatically describes the interactions of elements affecting the organisation. It highlights how non-production environments may be perceived as separate from the business systems, but despite the perceptions, these are still subject to the same legal requirements and constraints. It shows the interdependency of data, software, technical infrastructure and human interaction and how the change of one element may affect the others. The proposed framework describes the process flow and forms a practical solution in assisting the decision-making process and providing documentary evidence for assurance and audit purposes. It looks at the requirements of the non-production system in relation to the legal and regulatory constraints, as well as the organisational requirements and business systems. The impact of human factors on the data is also considered to bring a holistic approach to the protection of non-production environments.

A DataSpace Support Platform (DSSP) is a self-sustained and self-managed system which needs to support uncertainty among its mediated schemas and its schema mappings. Some approaches for managing such uncertainty by assigning probabilities and reliability degrees to schema mappings have been proposed. Unfortunately, the number of mappings self-generated by a DSSP is usually too large and among those possible mappings, some might be totally correct and others partially correct. Therefore, providing probabilities or reliability degrees to the mappings is necessary but not sufficient to resolve uncertainty among them. This paper proposes a stepper-based approach called pos-mapping to managing reliable mappings using possibility theory. Instead of choosing a threshold for managing the reliable mappings, pos-mapping approach orders and divides the set of reliable mappings into subsets of possibility distributions and assigns to each of these subsets a recursive possibility degree function. The recursiveness of the possibility degree function leads to an incremental management of the possibility distributions. Experimental results show that our system is more efficient than the existing systems and the accuracy of the results increases with the number of reliable schemas in the DSSP.

Security requirements deal with the protection of assets against unauthorized access (disclosure or modification) and their availability to authorized users. Temporal constraints of history-based access control policies are difficult to express naturally in traditional policy languages. We propose a compositional formal framework for the specification and verification of temporal access control policies for security critical systems in which history-based policies and other temporal constraints can be expressed. In particular, our framework allows for the specification of policies that can change dynamically in response to time or events enabling dynamic reconfiguration of the access control mechanisms. The framework utilizes a single well-defined formalism, interval temporal logic, for defining the semantics of these policies and to reason about them. We illustrate our approach with a detailed case study of an electronic paper submission system showing the compositional verification of their safety, liveness and information flow properties.