Power grids form the central critical infrastructure in all developed economies. Disruptions of power supply can cause major effects on the economy and the livelihood of citizens. At the same time, power grids are being targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks. To counter these threats, we propose a domain-specific language and a repository to represent power grids and related IT components that control the power grid. We apply our tool to a standard example used in the literature to assess its expressiveness.

Smart grid employs Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and network connectivity to optimize efficiency and deliver new functionalities. This evolution is associated with an increased risk for cybersecurity threats that may hamper smart grid operations. Power utility providers need tools for assessing risk of prevailing cyberthreats over ICT infrastructures. The need for frameworks to guide the development of these tools is essential to define and reveal vulnerability analysis indicators. We propose a data-driven approach for designing testbeds to allow the simulation of cyberattacks in order to evaluate the vulnerability and the impact of cyber threat attacks. The proposed framework uses data reported from multiple smart grid components at different smart grid architecture layers, including physical, control, and cyber layers. The multi-agent based framework proposed in this paper would analyze the conglomeration of these data reports to assert malicious attacks.

This paper discusses the blend of cognitive computing with the Internet-of-Things that should result into developing cognitive things. Today’s things are confined into a data-supplier role, which deprives them from being the technology of choice for smart applications development. Cognitive computing is about reasoning, learning, explaining, acting, etc. In this paper, cognitive things’ features include functional and non-functional restrictions along with a 3 stage operation cycle that takes into account these restrictions during reasoning, adaptation, and learning. Some implementation details about cognitive things are included in this paper based on a water pipe case-study.

This document reports a technical description of ELVIRA project results obtained as part of Work-package 2.1 entitled “Complex Dependencies Analysis”. In this technical report, we review attempts in recent researches where connections are regarded as influencing factors to  IT systems monitoring critical infrastructure, based on which potential dependencies and resulting disturbances are identified and categorized. Each kind of dependence has been discussed based on our own entity based model. Among those dependencies, logical and functional connections have been analysed with more details on modelling and simulation techniques.

Smart grid employs ICT infrastructure and network connectivity to optimize efficiency and deliver new functionalities. This evolu- tion is associated with an increased risk for cybersecurity threats that may hamper smart grid operations. Power utility providers need tools for assessing risk of prevailing cyberthreats over ICT infrastructures. The need for frameworks to guide the develop- ment of these tools is essential to define and reveal vulnerability analysis indicators. We propose a data-driven approach for design- ing testbeds to evaluate the vulnerability of cyberphysical systems against cyberthreats. The proposed framework uses data reported from multiple components of cyberphysical system architecture layers, including physical, control, and cyber layers. At the phys- ical layer, we consider component inventory and related physi- cal flows. At the control level, we consider control data, such as SCADA data flows in industrial and critical infrastructure control systems. Finally, at the cyber layer level, we consider existing secu- rity and monitoring data from cyber-incident event management tools, which are increasingly embedded into the control fabrics of cyberphysical systems.

Smart grid adopts ICT to enhance power-delivery management. However, these advanced technologies also introduce an increasing amount of cyber threats. Cyber threats occur because of vulnerabilities throughout smart-grid layers. Each layer is distinguished by typical data flows. For example, power-data stream flows along the physical layer; command data are pushed to and pulled from sensor-control devices, such as RTUs and PLCs. Vulnerabilities expose these data flows to cyber threat via communication networks, such as local control network, vendor network, corporate network and the wider internet. Thus, these data could be used to analyse vulnerabilities against cyber threats. After data collection, data analysis and modelling techniques would be used for vulnerability assessment.

There are still disparities in technology-access despite economic pressures and widespread promises to overcome them. The induced digital gap defines the degree of digital citizenship for which, unified policies have yet to be drawn at various educational levels to reduce that gap. The quest for a broad participation to develop digital citizenship competencies needs further investigations into innovative educational approaches, pedagogical methods, and routine practices that foster digital literacy, and narrows the digital divide. This special issue accumulates original theoretical and empirical research contributions across contemporary digital citizenship perspectives. The final selection of the papers explores digital citizenship concepts such as ethics, digital literacy and participation, in various contexts to develop opportunities for a wider engagement in social actions. The international perspectives of contributing authors shed lights on digital citizenship prospects across unique contexts among different nations. 

This document reports a technical description of ELVIRA project results obtained as part of Work- package 4.1 entitled “Multi-agent systems for power Grid monitoring”. ELVIRA project is a collaboration between researchers in School of IT at University of Skövde and Combitech Technical Consulting Company in Sweden, with the aim to design, develop and test a testbed simulator for critical infrastructures cybersecurity. This report outlines intelligent approaches that continuously analyze data flows generated by Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, which monitor contemporary power grid infrastructures. However, cybersecurity threats and security mechanisms cannot be analyzed and tested on actual systems, and thus testbed simulators are necessary to assess vulnerabilities and evaluate the infrastructure resilience against cyberattacks. This report suggests an agent-based model to simulate SCADA- like cyber-components behaviour when facing cyber-infection in order to experiment and test intelligent mitigation mechanisms. 

Vulnerability is defined as ”weakness of an asset or control that can be exploited by a threat” according to ISO/IEC 27000:2009, and it is a vital cyber-security issue to protect cyber-physical systems (CPSs) employed in a range of critical infrastructures (CIs). However, how to quantify both individual and system vulnerability are still not clear. In our proposed poster, we suggest a new procedure to evaluate CPS vulnerability. We reveal a vulnerability-tree model to support the evaluation of CPS-wide vulnerability index, driven by a hierarchy of vulnerability-scenarios resulting synchronously or propagated by tandem vulnerabilities throughout CPS architecture, and that could be exploited by threat agents. Multiple vulnerabilities are linked by boolean operations at each level of the tree. Lower-level vulnerabilities in the tree structure can be exploited by threat agents in order to reach parent vulnerabilities with increasing CPS criticality impacts. At the asset-level, we suggest a novel fuzzy-logic based valuation of vulnerability along standard metrics. Both the procedure and fuzzy-based approach are discussed and illustrated through SCADA-based smart power-grid system as a case study in the poster, with our goal to streamline the process of vulnerability computation at both asset and CPS levels.

Cloud service providers typically compose their services from a number of elementary services, which are developed in- house or built by third-party providers. Personalization of composite services in mobile environments is an interesting and challenging issue to address, given the opportunity to factor-in diverse user preferences and the plethora of mobile devices at use in multiple contexts. This work proposes a framework to address personalization in mobile cloud-service provisioning. Service personalization and adaptation may be considered at different levels, including the user profile, the mobile device in use, the context of the user and the composition specification. The user’s mobile device and external services are typical sources of context information, used in our proposed algorithm to elicit context-aware services. The selection process is guided by quality-of-context (QoC) criteria that combine cloud-service provider requirements and user preferences. Hence, the paper proposes an integrated framework for enhancing personalized mobile cloud-services, based on a composition approach that adapts context information using a common model of service metadata specification.