This article describes the design, development and implementation of a set of microservices based on an architecture that enables detection and assisted clinical diagnosis within the field of infectious diseases of elderly patients, via a telemonitoring system. The proposed system is designed to continuously update a medical database fed with vital signs from biosensor kits applied by nurses to elderly people on a daily basis. The database is hosted in the cloud and is managed by a flexible microservices software architecture. The computational paradigms of the edge and the cloud were used in the implementation of a hybrid cloud architecture in order to support versatile high-performance applications under the microservices pattern for the pre-diagnosis of infectious diseases in elderly patients. The results of an analysis of the usability of the equipment, the performance of the architecture and the service concept show that the proposed e-health system is feasible and innovative. The system components are also selected to give a cost-effective implementation for people living in disadvantaged areas. The proposed e-health system is also suitable for distributed computing, big data and NoSQL structures, thus allowing the immediate application of machine learning and AI algorithms to discover knowledge patterns from the overall population.

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Telemonitoring System for Infectious Disease Prediction in Elderly People Based on a Novel Microservice Architecture

Automated deployment and run-time management of microservices-based applications in cloud computing environments is relatively well studied with several mature solutions. However, managing such applications and tasks in the cloud-to-edge continuum is far from trivial, with no robust, production-level solutions currently available. This paper presents our first attempt to extend an application-level cloud orchestration framework called MiCADO to utilise edge and fog worker nodes. The paper illustrates how MiCADO-Edge can automatically deploy complex sets of interconnected microservices in such multi-layered cloud-to-edge environments. Additionally, it shows how monitoring information can be collected from such services and how complex, user- defined run-time management policies can be enforced on application components running at any layer of the architecture. The implemented solution is demonstrated and evaluated using two realistic case studies from the areas of video processing and secure healthcare data analysis.

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MiCADO-Edge: Towards an Application-level Orchestrator for the Cloud-to-Edge Computing Continuum

/pdf/napierone-a-modern-mixed-file-data-set-alternative-to-1hqmy4vm.pdf

NapierOne: A modern mixed file data set alternative to Govdocs1

Differential area analysis for ransomware attack detection within mixed file datasets

As cloud adoption increases, so do the number of available cloud service providers. Moving complex applications between clouds can be beneficial - or other times necessary - but achieving this so-called cloud portability is rarely straightforward. This paper presents the adoption of OASIS TOSCA, a standard in the declarative description of cloud applications, to encourage and facilitate cloud portability in MiCADO, an application-level multi-cloud orchestration and auto-scaling framework. The interface to MiCADO is an Application Description Template, which draws from the TOSCA specification to describe an application in MiCADO. The generic design of these templates is presented and their applicability for achieving portability between different container and cloud environments is analysed and evaluated.
A proof-of-concept where MiCADO serves as the deployment and execution engine for a Science Gateway in Sleep Healthcare is then described. In this proof-of concept, MiCADO facilitates the deployment of a complex healthcare application, which is then moved from one cloud service provider to another with only minimal changes to the template which originally described it. This TOSCA-based approach to templates in MiCADO encourages movement between clouds by making cloud portability more approachable.

Cloud apps to‐go: Cloud portability with TOSCA and MiCADO

Ransomware is a type of malware which restricts access to a victim’s computing resources and demands a ransom in order to restore access. This is a continually growing and costly threat across the globe, therefore efforts have been made both in academia and industry to develop techniques that can help to detect and recover from ransomware attacks. This paper aims to provide an overview of the current landscape of Windows-based anti-ransomware tools and techniques, using a clear, simple and consistent terminology in terms of Data Sources, Processing and Actions. We extensively analysed relevant literature so that, to the best of our knowledge, we had at the time covered all approaches taken to detect and recover from ransomware attacks. We grouped these techniques according to their main features as a way to understand the landscape. We then selected 15 existing anti-ransomware tools both to examine how they fit into this landscape and to compare them by aggregating their accuracy and overhead – two of the most important selection criteria of these tools – as reported by the tools’ respective authors. We were able to determine popular solutions and unexplored gaps that could lead to promising areas of anti-ransomware development. From there, we propose two novel detection techniques, namely serial byte correlation and edit distance. This paper serves as a much needed roadmap of knowledge and ideas to systematise the current landscape of anti-ransomware tools.

/pdf/a-roadmap-for-improving-the-impact-of-anti-ransomware-2mn8llxdjp.pdf

A Roadmap for Improving the Impact of Anti-Ransomware Research

https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/18276/4/FullText.pdf

A Cloud-agnostic Queuing System to Support the Implementation of Deadline-based Application Execution Policies

Our main goal is to develop a new solution to use multi-tier broadcast in order to deliver messages to all the devices in certain areas, whether they are connected to different networks, or not connected to any network. We use beacons (management frames) in the IEEE 802.11 protocol to send data from the access point to the clients without an association, and we use the probe request/response to exchange small amounts of data without being connected to the same network and without threatening the security of any of them.

Broadcasting Information in Variably Dense Environment Using Connectionless Data Exchange (CoLDE)

Acquiring current position information from the GNSS is a straightforward procedure outdoors. Any mobile device, equipped with a GNSS receiver, having a line of sight with enough numbers of satellites can calculate its location. The mobile device does not need a full connection with any of these satellites. In the indoor positioning using the Wireless Ethernet IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) standard, some accurate methods require the mobile device to send some initial data from its environment to a server, the server utilizes the data to calculate the exact location. The mobile device should be able to connect to this server, either by having an association with a Wi-Fi access point or using 3G/4G if the server is accessible from the Internet. In some cases, having a connection to the Internet is not possible, either because of the absence of the 3G/4G, or the Wi-Fi access points and the server are not for the public. This study aims to make the Wi-Fi indoor positioning systems available to all the mobile devices, exactly as the GPS, without even the need to be connected, either to the Internet, or to any of the Wi-Fi access points. In order to achieve this goal, we developed an extension, CoLDE (Connectionless Data Exchange), for the protocol IEEE 802.11. CoLDE utilizes the management frames to allow Wi-Fi devices and access points to exchange small amounts of data without having an association. Using CoLDE, the access points can relay the initial data (which they) received from the mobile device to the server, and send the exact position back to the Wi-Fi device. CoLDE can be utilized regardless of the used Wi-Fi indoor positioning. This paper gives the description and the implementation of the protocol used and the proposed method, in addition to the experimental results gathered in a feasibility study to validate some of the basic concepts of this approach.

Indoor positioning using CoLDE: An IEEE 802.11 connectionless extension

This paper describes an adaptive algorithm to calculate the position of wireless mobile devices in a heterogeneous environment such as a building, house or flat. Because the environment is not static, it is very important to measure the signal strength of wireless communications periodically in order to take into account all the modifications in the indoor area. These continuous measurements are taken between Wi-Fi Access-points. Such an algorithm allows to keep a good level of accuracy avoiding a degradation of the calculated position over the time. Our adaptive algorithm has been integrated into fault tolerant, redundant and scalable architecture.

Osama Abu Oun

Papers

A Roadmap for Improving the Impact of Anti-Ransomware Research

A Cloud-agnostic Queuing System to Support the Implementation of Deadline-based Application Execution Policies

Broadcasting Information in Variably Dense Environment Using Connectionless Data Exchange (CoLDE)

Indoor positioning using CoLDE: An IEEE 802.11 connectionless extension

Adaptive indoor positioning algorithm using auto-calibration