Communications play a fundamental role in the economic and social well-being of the citizens and on operations of most of the critical infrastructures (CIs). Extreme weather events, natural disasters and criminal attacks represent a challenge due to their increase in frequency and intensity requiring smarter resilience of the Communication CIs, which are extremely vulnerable due to the ever-increasing complexity of the architecture also in light of the evolution towards 5G, the extensive use of programmable platforms and exponential growth of connected devices. In this paper, we present the aim of RESISTO H2020 EU-funded project, which constitutes an innovative solution for Communication CIs holistic situation awareness and enhanced resilience.

Enhancing trust among service providers and end-users with respect to data protection is an urgent matter in the growing information society. In response, CREDENTIAL proposes an innovative cloud-based service for storing, managing, and sharing of digital identity information and other highly critical personal data with a demonstrably higher level of security than other current solutions. CREDENTIAL enables end-to-end confidentiality and authenticity as well as improved privacy in cloud-based identity management and data sharing scenarios. In this paper, besides clarifying the vision and use cases, we focus on the adoption of CREDENTIAL. Firstly, for adoption by providers, we elaborate on the functionality of CREDENTIAL, the services implementing these functions, and the physical architecture needed to deploy such services. Secondly, we investigate factors from related research that could be used to facilitate CREDENTIAL's adoption and list key benefits as convincing arguments.

This work is related to the combinatorial data analysis problem of seriation used for data visualization and exploratory analysis. Seriation re-sequences the data, so that more similar samples or objects appear closer together, whereas dissimilar ones are further apart. Despite the large number of current algorithms to realize such re-sequencing, there has not been a systematic way for analyzing the resulting sequences, comparing them, or fusing them to obtain a single unifying one. We propose a new positional proximity measure that evaluates the similarity of two arbitrary sequences based on their agreement on pairwise positional information of the sequenced objects. Furthermore, we present various statistical properties of this measure as well as its normalized version modeled as an instance of the generalized correlation coefficient. Based on this measure, we define a new procedure for consensus seriation that fuses multiple arbitrary sequences based on a quadratic assignment problem formulation and an efficient way of approximating its solution. We also derive theoretical links with other permutation distance functions and present their associated combinatorial optimization forms for consensus tasks. The utility of the proposed contributions is demonstrated through the comparison and fusion of multiple seriation algorithms we have implemented, using many real-world datasets from different application domains.

ABSTRACT Revealing one's interests in communication has been recognized as a growing problem in the Internet. We postulate that it is desirable for future information retrieval systems to provide privacy in both what information is requested and what information is received, without raising obstacles to the deployment of accounting and access control mechanisms. This paper outlines a solution that fulfills this requirement in the context of broker‐based systems, that is, systems in which brokers facilitate the communication between a consumer and a provider (of information). Broker‐assisted communication is a common paradigm used in many settings, including contemporary information‐centric networking approaches. We present the design and the evaluation of a solution that conceals consumers' interests, without hiding consumer identity or location. The developed solution is applied over a system of hierarchically organized brokers; similar systems are used in many information lookup services. Because in these systems, information is distributed in various locations, traditional private information retrieval (PIR) protocols exhibit significant communication overhead. Our solution achieves up to 97% less communication overhead compared with a PIR protocol, without additional computational overhead. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.