Abstract While approaches aimed at developing forensic-ready systems are starting to emerge, it is still primarily a theoretical concept. This paper presents a case study of integrating forensic readiness capabilities into SensitiveCloud, an information system for storing and processing sensitive data. A risk-based approach to forensic readiness design is followed to achieve it. Consequently, weaknesses in both processes and systems are identified, and forensic readiness requirements are formulated. This case study reports on lessons learned in a practical implementation of a forensic-ready system, its impact on security, and its support towards ISO/IEC 27k.

With the rapid increase of published open datasets, it is crucial to support the open data progress in smart cities while considering the open data quality. In the Czech Republic, and its National Open Data Catalogue (NODC), the open datasets are usually evaluated based on their metadata only, while leaving the content and the adherence to the recommended data structure to the sole responsibility of the data providers. The interoperability of open datasets remains unknown. This paper therefore aims to propose a novel content-aware quality evaluation framework that assesses the quality of open datasets based on five data quality dimensions. With the proposed framework, we provide a fundamental view on the interoperability-oriented data quality of Czech open datasets, which are published in NODC. Our evaluations find that domain-specific open data quality assessments are able to detect data quality issues beyond traditional heuristics used for determining Czech open data quality, increase their interoperability, and thus increase their potential to bring value for the society. The findings of this research are beneficial not only for the case of the Czech Republic, but also can be applied in other countries that intend to enhance their open data quality evaluation processes.

With the increasing threat of cybercrime, there is also an increasing need for the forensic investigation of those crimes. However, the topic of systematic preparation on the possible forensic investigation during the software development, called forensic readiness, has only been explored since recently. Thus, there are still many challenges and open issues. One of the obstacles is ensuring the correct implementation. Moreover, the growing volume and variety of digital evidence produced by the systems have to be put into consideration. It is especially important in the critical information infrastructure domain where potential cyberattacks could impact the safety of people. In this paper, we present research towards verification of forensic readiness in software development, with a focus on digital evidence they produce, to assist the advancement of this research domain. Furthermore, we formulate a process that serves a template for designing, developing, and refining a verification method for forensic-ready software systems.

Nowadays, a variety of Big Data architectures are emerging to organize the Big Data life cycle. While some of these architectures are proposed for general usage, many of them are proposed in a specific application domain such as smart cities, transportation, healthcare, and agriculture. There is, however, a lack of understanding of how and why Big Data architectures vary in different domains and how the Big Data architecture strategy in one domain may possibly advance other domains. Therefore, this paper surveys and compares the Big Data architectures in different application domains. It also chooses a representative architecture of each researched application domain to indicate which Big Data architecture from a given domain the researchers and practitioners may possibly start from. Next, a pairwise cross-domain comparison among the Big Data architectures is presented to outline the similarities and differences between the domain-specific architectures. Finally, the paper provides a set of practical guidelines for Big Data researchers and practitioners to build and improve Big Data architectures based on the knowledge gathered in this study.

With the development of Big Data applications in Smart Cities, various Big Data applications are proposed within the domain. These are however hard to test and prototype, since such prototyping requires big computing resources. In order to save the effort in building Big Data prototypes for Smart Cities, this paper proposes an enhanced sampling technique to obtain a coreset from Big Data while keeping the features of the Big Data, such as clustering structure and distribution density. In the proposed sampling method, for a given dataset and an e > 0, the method computes an e-coreset of the dataset. The e-coreset is then modified to obtain a sample set while ensuring the separation and balance in the set. Furthermore, by considering the representativeness of each sample point, our method can helps to remove noises and outliers. We believe that the coreset-based technique can be used to efficiently prototype and evaluate Big Data applications in the Smart City.

Reliability is an essential attribute of mission-and safety-critical systems. Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) are regression-based models that use historical failure data to predict the reliability-related parameters. At the moment, there is no dedicated tool available that would be able to cover the whole process of SRGMs data preparation and application from issue repositories, discouraging replications and reuse in other projects. In this paper, we introduce STRAIT, a free and open-source tool for automatic software reliability growth analysis which utilizes data from issue repositories. STRAIT features downloading, filtering and processing of data from provided issue repositories for use in multiple SRGMs, suggesting the best fitting SRGM with multiple data snapshots to consider software evolution. The tool is designed to be highly extensible, in terms of additional issue repositories, SRGMs, and new data filtering and processing options. Quality engineers can use STRAIT for the evaluation of their software systems. The research community can use STRAIT for empirical studies which involve evaluation of new SRGMs or comparison of multiple SRGMs.