The purpose of this paper is to present the SHIELD holistic approach: an innovative methodology to address Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in the context of Embedded Systems (ES) by means of control science theory. The SHIELD methodology consider the SPD functionalities offered by the generic atomic component of a complex system at 3 different levels: node, network and middleware. Then these technologies are enhanced with a fourth vertical layer named overlay that provides composability functionality, thus creating a framework able to dynamically reconfigure to satisfy the user needs in terms of SPD, in different scenarios. In order to achieve this objective, the use of specific SPD metrics (derived from recognized standards for security, like the ISO/IEC 15408), is proposed. The results presented in this work have been developed in the scope of the pSHIELD ARTEMIS-JU project and are currently under investigation in the nSHIELD project. ?????? 2012 IEEE

This paper presents a control strategy for Cyber-Physical System defense developed in the framework of the European Project ATENA, that concerns Critical Infrastructure (CI) protection. The aim of the controller is to find the optimal security configuration, in terms of countermeasures to implement, in order to address the system vulnerabilities. The attack/defense problem is modeled as a multi-agent general sum game, where the aim of the defender is to prevent the most damage possible by finding an optimal trade-off between prevention actions and their costs. The problem is solved utilizing Reinforcement Learning and simulation results provide a proof of the proposed concept, showing how the defender of the protected CI is able to minimize the damage caused by his/her opponents by finding the Nash equilibrium of the game in the zero-sum variant, and, in a more general scenario, by driving the attacker in the position where the damage she/he can cause to the infrastructure is lower than the cost it has to sustain to enforce her/his attack strategy.

The purpose of this work is to provide an enhanced adaptive approach to classic queue-based Bandwidth-on-Demand (BoD) procedures in broadband satellite networks. In queue-based schemes, the controller's objective is to drive the buffer queue length to an appropriate reference queue length, and the efficiency of the control strictly depends on the choice of its reference value. In latest approaches, solutions to adaptively modify the target reference queue length based on a set of network information have been proposed; nevertheless, in such approaches, the satellite terminals should base their control strategies on information which are not available to them, according to the communication standards of state-of-the-art technologies, such as DVB-RCS. The novelty of the presented algorithm is that it overcomes this limit by dynamically changing the reference queue length, based on information actually broadcast to the network terminals; the algorithm is at same time simple and effective, and is based on a game-theoretic approach which benefits of recent advances in congestion pricing theory. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is supported by Opnet (R) simulations as well as by considerations about the real implementability of the solution

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