Recent progress in IoT and software development has simplified data acquisition and immutability of information in the agri-food supply chain. In the last few years, several frameworks and applications were proposed to ensure traceability in the agri-food-sector using distributed ledger technologies (DLT) such as Blockchain technologies. Still, no other study has presented a Blockchain-based traceability platform with a lower impact on the environment and lower cost for each transaction sent by the supply chain. This article presents a traceability platform based on Green Blockchain with low energy consumption and costs savings applied to the Fontina PDO cheese supply chain, part of the project “Typicalp”, funded by the European Union (EU). The proposed traceability system is based on Algorand Blockchain, which uses the Pure Proof-of-Stake mechanism of consensus that requires minimal computational power, is highly scalable and environmentally sustainable. In addition to the environmental and financial benefits, the developed traceability platform has made it possible to digitize the entire production chain, making the data immutable and available in real-time for Fontina consortium operators and final consumers.

The ionosphere is the single largest contributor to the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) error budget and ionospheric scintillation (IS) in particular is one of its most harmful effects. The Ground Based Scintillation Climatology (GBSC) has been recently developed by INGV as a software tool to identify the main areas of the ionosphere in which IS is more likely to occur. Due to the high computational load required, GBSC is currently used only for scientific, offline, studies and not as a real time service. Recently, a collaboration was initiated between ISMB and INGV in order to identify which cloud service model (IaaS, PaaS or SaaS) is most suitable for implementing the GBSC technique within the cloud computing environment. The aims of this joined effort are twofold: i) to optimize the computational resources allocation strategy/plan for the GBSC service, ii) to fine tune the algorithm for dynamic and real time application, towards a service contributing to high precision professional applications for the GNSS-reliant business sectors. Preliminary result of the implementation of GBSC within the cloud environment will be shown.

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The adoption of Cloud computing involves many advantages in terms of flexibility, scalability and reliability, but also implies new challenges on security, data privacy and protection of personal data. Since more and more sensitive applications and data are moved to the cloud, to verify that each of the participants in the electronic communication is really who he claims to be has become a crucial challenge. Currently, the use of biometric techniques can be considered as an effective solution to ensure a significant increase of security in the authentication protocols managed by modern authentication servers. However the use of biometric data for the logical access to IT services is a more challenging and still unsolved problem. The project Cloud for SME integrates a biometric authentication based on fingerprints with a cloud computing platform, investigating how highly secure authentication methods can increase the adoption of cloud computing technologies among small and medium enterprises.

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