The ICT Comifin project is a 2.5 year project that is strategically targeting the EU technological and institutional lag in financial infrastructure protection (FIP). Specifically, CoMIFin aims to provide “an infrastructure level monitoring, notification and mitigation” middleware as an essential element of FIP. CoMiFin aims at supporting business continuity of a financial actor on top of an unmanaged network of managed financial infrastructures under all foreseeable failure scenarios including the operational failures and deliberate breaches. This is a nontrivial task requiring a holistic and cooperative approach across multiple elements of a financial infrastructure, such as disparate financial and telco networks, various middleware platforms, and other interconnecting components.

Project Implementation

In the ICT Comifin project the TSSG are focused in defining scenarios where security aspects shall play a major role (such as in the financial infrastructure area) and in the projects architecture definition. The TSSG are implementing the security part of the infrastructure middleware component and plays an important role for technical dissemination of ICT CoMiFin outcomes.

The ICT Parsifal project is a 1.5 year project that is targeting an objective concerning how to better protect Critical Financial Infrastructures (CFI), but also other information infrastructure that link CFI with other sector Critical Infrastructures (CI) in Europe. This is a long term vision and PARSIFAL works towards it by setting short-term project objectives, to be fulfilled during the project lifetime, as well as the execution of coordination actions and research road mapping that contribute to an effective and faster fulfilment of this longer-term vision.

Project Implementation

The European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP) underlines that since various sectors possess particular experience, expertise and requirements with CIP, then EPCIP will be developed on a sector-by-sector basis and implemented following an agreed list of CIP sectors. The European Critical Infrastructure Directive puts forward in an Annex a list of 11 critical infrastructure sectors, which includes the financial CI sector.

The PARSIFAL project is targeting this objective, concerning how to better protect CFI and information infrastructure that link CFI with other Critical Infrastructure in Europe. This is a long term vision and PARSIFAL is working towards it by setting short-term project objectives, to be fulfilled during the project lifetime, as well as the execution of coordination actions and research road mapping that contribute to an effective and faster fulfilment of this longer-term vision..

What makes PARSIFAL different from other initiatives is, primarily, its focus on CFI and the involvement of stakeholders from the financial sector. Secondly, PARSIFAL dedicates special attention to the relationship between the protection of Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) and trust, which is the key business requirement in the financial world. Moreover, specific technological challenges, such as the role of privacy to achieve trust in CFI, the separation of identity from financial applications, or network and service security issues (including IT security policies etc), are currently not considered and coordinated in relation to the protection of CFI.

Project Acheivements

The TSSG had a strong delegation at the Future Internet Assembly (FIA) conference in Prague 10th-13th May 2009.

Willie Donnelly, Director of the TSSG, was the Irish national delegate at the meeting on national Future Internet initiatives. These reflect the EU-level activities in local activities in each member state.

Kevin Quinn represented the TSSG in the activities relating to Future Internet infrastructure, management and testbeds. This maps to the activity in the TSSG in our Communications Infrastructure Management (CIM) competence centre led by Miguel ponce de Leon. The key EU FP7 projects with TSSG involvement in this area are: 4WARD, EFIPSANS, AutoI, and PanLabs II (PII). Steven Davy, Kevin Quinn and Martín Serrano attended a session on "Management and Service-Aware Networking Architectures for Future Internet" or MANA for short. This session was opened by Rainer Zimmermann, the Head of Unit, Future Networks in FP7. The big topics of the day were scalability of future internet architectures with respect to addressing and routing, and specifically in relation to the realisation of virtual networks. These were raised in the panel sessions concerning Future Internet Architectures and the MANA panel session. Also raised were issues related to stability of multiple competing autonomic control loops, or "who controls the control loops?".

Patrick Hayden represented the TSSG in the activities relating to Future Internet services. This maps to the activity in the TSSG in our Pervasive Communications Services (PCS) competence centre led by Kevin Doolin. The key EU FP7 projects with TSSG involvement in this area are: PERSIST and VITAL++. Patrick presented PERSIST at the Future Internet Service Offer session and participated in panel 1 whose topic was "Challenges for the Future Internet". The panel discussed the challenges and functionalities of the future internet as provided by the Future Internet Taskforce. PERSIST addresses 69 of the 177 functionalities (39%) identified by the Future Internet Taskforce. In his presentation, Patrick outlined which functionalities are addressed by PERSIST and identified a number of the resulting research challenges.

Jim Clarke and Brian Foley are nominated “caretakers” for the Future Internet Assembly Trust and Identity Group. Their role for FIA Prague was organisation and running of three dedicated Trust and Identity Breakout sessions on: (1) Identity Provisioning, (2) Trust Platforms, Models and Tools and (3) Experimental and Empirical Approaches for Trust, Privacy and Identity in the Future Internet. This maps to the activity in the TSSG in our Security Special Interest Group (SIG), that is currently a important sub-set of the CIM competence centre activity. The key EU FP7 projects with TSSG involvement in this area are: Inco-Trust, Think-Trust, CoMiFin, and Parsifal.

The TSSG presented at a permanent stand at the event highlighting interim results of selected current projects. The TSSG has 11 FP7 projects directly linked to the EU Future Internet Assembly, and a number of other active projects with some relevance. A technical presentation of a policy-based mutlihoming solution was presented. This multihoming solution uses the recently IETF-approved protocol “SHIM6”, which is part of the IPv6 suite of protocols. The TSSG presentation is one of the few worldwide implementations of SHIM6. On top of this the TSSG have developed a policy engine where the user can specify preferred end-to-end paths, which affects the operation of the SHIM6 protocols to meet the preference where possible. This work was carried out as part of the TSSG’s involvement in the EFIPSANS project.

As the role of the Future Internet Assembly is to bring together researchers across interrelated domains, the TSSG members attended and contributed to a number of other relevant sessions. The full set of slides will be available shortly on the Future Internet Forum Web portal.

The participants consisted of over 60 program management and researchers involved in Information Communications Technologies (ICT) and Trust, Security and Privacy from the EU, USA, Japan, Korea, Australia and Canada. The workshop was a success and the participants discussed together about the topics and research challenges that are required and will benefit from international collaboration in order to attain a trustworthy future Internet.

In addition to talks from the Governments program management perspective and technical keynote addresses, there were three working panel sessions dedicated to: A. Dependability & Security of Future Large scale Networked Systems;
B. Privacy and Trust in the Information Society; and
C. Program Management Cooperation Mechanisms.

Within panel A, the issues addressed included Trust, Security and Privacy specifications for the design of architectures, protocols and environments that will constitute future large-scale and globally networked ICT systems. Panel B focused on key elements necessary for securing the applications and services operating across future large-scale networked systems, including trust management models and the articulation of security and privacy to reinforce trust, with emphasis on user-centric privacy enhancing technologies, mechanisms for accountability, liability, and monitoring, and a privacy-respecting naming and identity-management framework (of individuals, organisations and digital entities). Panel C comprised of governmental research program managers of the involved countries / regions to discuss organisational and practical cooperation aspects of their programs. This enabled a delineation between technical and non-technical issues in order to better focus on the options, possibilities and mechanisms for cooperative programs and collaborations to be explored.

More information on the workshop can be found at www.inco-trust.eu under the Workshops banner.

About FAME Lead PI (Name and Title): William Donnelly, Dr.
Lead Institution: Waterford Institute of Technology
Co-PIs (Names, Titles, Institution):

• Declan O’Sullivan, Dr., TCD
• Liam Murphy, Prof., UCD
• Douglas Leith, Prof., NUIM
• John Strassner, WIT

Academic Partner Institutions:

• Trinity College Dublin, TCD
• University College Dublin, UCD
• National University Ireland Maynooth, NUIM
• University College Cork, UCC

Industry Partners:

• Alcatel-Lucent, Dublin
• Cisco Systems, Galway
• LM Ericsson Limited, Dublin
• IBM Ireland Product Limited, Dublin
• Telefónica I+D, Madrid, Spain
• Hewlett Packard, New Jersey, USA

A key challenge for the telecommunications industry is to deliver and manage end-to-end communications services over an interconnected, but heterogeneous, networking infrastructure. The SFI-funded Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end communication services (FAME) Strategic Research Cluster (SRC) will develop autonomic management solutions incorporating new semantic analysis techniques, that can be applied to build federated network and service management systems that understand changes in the environment and coordinate their actions to reconfigure network resources and services to effectively deliver services on an end-to-end basis. FAME brings together academics and industry specialists in the management of communications networks and services. This project is pushing the barriers of what is technically possible in terms of allowing forms of self-management, allowing some parts of a network, and some services that run on these networks, to “work out for themselves” what is needed to operate efficiently. Intellectual Property and technical know-how generated by FAME will enable the creation and growth of an Irish-based international communications service management cluster that will grow the considerable investment already made in this sector by multinational companies, such as the cluster partners Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, IBM, and Telefónica I+D, as well as indigenous communications management companies. Together this cluster will help position Ireland as a global leader in communications management related research, product development and professional services.