The Final Review of the ICARUS H2020 project, held virtually  on the 26^th of August 2021, was completed with great success, marking the end of the 42-month project. During the meeting, the progress of the project  and the outstanding work carried out during the second period of the project was presented by the WP leaders and the relevant Task leaders in a collaborative atmosphere. The Project Officer and Reviewers expressed their enthusiasm about the achievements and the final outcomes of the project which has fully achieved its objective and milestones for the period according to their feedback and assessment.

Continue reading Successful final review for the ICARUS Innovation Action

UBITECH’s paper entitled “Towards Platform-Agnostic and Autonomous Orchestration of Big Data Services” has been accepted to be presented at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Machine Learning Applications (BIGDATASERVICE 2021) held online, worldwide from August 23rd to August 26th, 2021. The UBITECH’s Privacy-preserving Distributed Machine Learning research group presents a comprehensive microservices architecture to ease the management and enactment of end-to[1]end big data workflow management processes. It is developed along with intuitive graphical user interfaces to abstract and hide to the end user the specificities of the underlying network, storage and compute infrastructure. Entitled as Big Data Apps Composition Environment, it facilitates the design, composition, configuration, orchestration, enactment, and validation of end[1]to-end big data analytic services actuated into deployment workflows. The approach of Ms. Iatropoulou, Mr. Petrou, Dr Karagiorgou and Dr Alexandrou differentiates to the current engines, as it adopts a big data-driven methodology which is scalable to multiple executors and has embedded notebooks for on-demand and real-time scripting analytics. Therefore, big data services and analytic applications deployment are being accelerated, while semi-automatic scaling through the definition of multiple executors for improved time performance of demanding tasks is supported.

Continue reading UBITECH presents a scientific paper on big data services autonomous orchestration at IEEE BIGDATASERVICE 2021

UBITECH’s paper entitled “On Strengthening SMEs and MEs Threat Intelligence and Awareness by Identifying Data Breaches, Stolen Credentials and Illegal Activities on the Dark Web” has been accepted to be presented at the International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2021) held as an all-digital conference from August 17th to August 20th, 2021. The UBITECH’s Privacy-preserving Distributed Machine Learning research group devises Machine Learning and specialised Information Retrieval techniques to extract insights and investigate how the Dark Web enables cybercrime, maintains marketplaces with breached enter[1]prise data collections and pawned email accounts. The research questions that Mr. Pantelis, Mr. Petrou, Dr Karagiorgou and Dr Alexandrou address concern: a) the role that the Dark Web plays for SMEs, MEs, and society in general; b) the criticality of cybercriminal activities and operations in the Dark Web exploiting threat taxonomies and scoring schemes; and c) the maturity and efficiency of technical tools and methods to curb illegal activities on the Dark Web through raising awareness via efficient text analytics, visual reporting and alerting mechanisms.

Continue reading UBITECH presents a scientific paper on illegal activities identification on the dark Web at ARES 2021

Following a peer-review process, Sensors MDPI Journal has accepted to publish a scientific manuscript, co-authored by UBITECH’s Sofianna Menesidou and Dimitris Papamartzivanos (members of the Digital Security and Trusted Computing Research Group), entitled “Automated Cyber and Privacy Risk Management Toolkit”. Dr Menesidou, Dr Papamartzivanos and their co-editors present a cyber and privacy risk management toolkit, called AMBIENT (Automated Cyber and Privacy Risk Management Toolkit) that constitutes a decision support platform that exhibits cyber risk assessment, privacy risk assessment according to GDPR terms and requirements, and cyber risk control (proactive, i.e., before threats are materialised) and mitigation (reactive, i.e., when signs of intrusions are present or new risks have been identified). At the same time, AMBIENT determines an optimal allocation of a financial budget to various cyber controls adopting the weakest link model. Continue reading New manuscript on cyber and privacy risk assessment has been accepted for publication at the Sensors MDPI Journal

University of Patras, as coordinating partner, along with UBITECH and 22 more partners coming from Greek industry and academia announce the establishment of the first 5G/6G Competence Center in Greece, a cluster that aims at the capitalization of relevant research results and know-how produced by universities or other knowledge-producing public organizations in Greece or abroad. According to the recent decision of the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation (GSRI) that announces the successful evaluation and approval of the 5G/6G Competence Center, the proposed “π-ΝΕΤ” Competence Center will constitute a public-private partnership scheme, aiming to bridge the gap between demand and supply of specialized innovation services and technology transfer in the 5G communication technologies sector, focusing on the support and sustainability of vertical value chains.

Continue reading UBITECH participates in the establishment of the first Greek 5G/6G Competence Center

The first, interim review of the RAINBOW H2020 Research and Innovation Action with external reviewers and the Project Officer from the European Commission side took place (virtually) on July 29, 2021, wherein the RAINBOW consortium successfully presented the results of the work of the project during the first 18 months of the project. The vision of RAINBOW is to design and develop an open and trusted fog computing platform that facilitates the deployment and management of scalable, heterogeneous and secure IoT services and cross-cloud applications (i.e., microservices). RAINBOW falls within the bigger vision of delivering a platform enabling users to remotely control the infrastructure that is running, potentially, on hundreds of edge devices (e.g., wearables), thousands of fog nodes in a factory building or flying in the sky (e.g., drones), and millions of vehicles travelling in a certain area or across Europe. UBITECH is serving as the project’s administrative and technical coordinator, therefore presented the project’s progress towards its technical and operational objectives, as well as a summary of the project’s achievements so far.

Publishing a new blog post at the website of the STAR Research and Innovation Action (https://star-ai.eu/), UBITECH’s Entso Veliou, Dimitris Papamartzivanos and Thanassis Giannetsos (members of the Digital Security and Trusted Computing Research Group) discuss the benefits from the wide applicability of AI-enabled data verification frameworks in manufacturing environments, employing deep learning techniques in the form of neural networks to address the issue of possible data poisoning and evasion attacks in smart manufacturing environments while demonstrating high accuracy and scalability.

Continue reading UBITECH discusses the potentials of trustworthy AI in manufacturing

The Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences (ICE-HT) of the Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), as coordinating partner, along with UBITECH and 10 more partners coming from Greek industry and research community announce the establishment of a reference Competence Center for 3D printing technologies in Greece and Southeastern Europe. The aforementioned competence center aims at the capitalization of relevant research results and know-how produced by universities or other knowledge-producing public organizations in Greece or abroad.

Continue reading UBITECH participates in the establishment of the first 3D Printing Competence Center in Greece and Southeast Europe

The paper “Segregating Keys from noncense: Timely Exfil of Ephemeral Keys from Embedded Systems” has been accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2021) that takes place 14-16 July 2021 in Cyprus, at the Coral Bay near the city of Pafos. Dr Thanassis Giannetsos, Head of UBITECH’s Digital Security and Trusted Computing Research Group, and his co-author, from DTU, demonstrate how adversaries can, without knowing the software layout or memory data structures of running services, exploit the Key-Exposure Problem (KEP) in network-connected resource-constrained microcontroller-based embedded systems (MCUS) to exfiltrate cryptographic keys, during system operation systematically, without affecting system usability.

Continue reading UBITECH presents a scientific paper on ephemeral keys extraction from embedded systems at DCOSS 2021

In collaboration with Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the European Research Center of Huawei Technologies in Germany, UBITECH publishes a preprint entitled “BLINDTRUST: Oblivious Remote Attestation for Secure Service Function Chains” at the arXiv open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation. Dr Thanassis Giannetsos, Head of UBITECH’s Digital Security and Trusted Computing Research Group, and his co-authors present a lightweight dynamic configuration integrity verification that enables inter and intra-device attestation without disclosing any configuration information and can be applied on both resource-constrained edge devices and cloud services. Their goal is to enhance run-time software integrity and trustworthiness with a scalable solution eliminating the need for federated infrastructure trust.

Continue reading UBITECH publishes an e-print on Oblivious Remote Attestation for Secure Service Function Chains at arXiv