Nicola Dragoni

Alberto Giaretta, Stefano Pepe, Nicola Dragoni

The Internet of Things (IoT) has caused a revolutionary paradigm shift in computer networking. After decades of human-centered routines, where devices were merely tools that enabled human beings to authenticate themselves and perform activities, we are now dealing with a device-centered paradigm: the devices themselves are actors, not just tools for people. Conventional identity access management (IAM) frameworks were not designed to handle the challenges of IoT. Trying to use traditional IAM systems to reconcile heterogeneous devices and complex federations of online services (e.g., IoT sensors and cloud computing solutions) adds a cumbersome architectural layer that can become hard to maintain and act as a single point of failure. In this paper, we propose UniquID, a blockchain-based solution that overcomes the need for centralized IAM architectures while providing scalability and robustness. We also present the experimental results of a proof-of-concept UniquID enrolment network, and we discuss two different use-cases that show the considerable value of a blockchain-based IAM.

Manuel Mazzara, Antonio Bucchiarone, Nicola Dragoni et al.

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.

Alberto Giaretta, Michele De Donno, Nicola Dragoni

The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and command the robot. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be fixed, thus, avoided in the future. The very final aim of this work is to push the rise of the security level of IoT products before they are sold on the public market.

Alberto Giaretta, Nicola Dragoni, Manuel Mazzara

Cloud computing is steadily growing and, as IaaS vendors have started to offer pay-as-you-go billing policies, it is fundamental to achieve as much elasticity as possible, avoiding over-provisioning that would imply higher costs. In this paper, we briefly analyse the orchestration characteristics of PaaSSOA, a proposed architecture already implemented for Jolie microservices, and Kubernetes, one of the various orchestration plugins for Docker; then, we outline similarities and differences of the two approaches, with respect to their own domain of application. Furthermore, we investigate some ideas to achieve a federation of the two technologies, proposing an architectural composition of Jolie microservices on Docker Container-as-a-Service layer.

Alberto Giaretta, Nicola Dragoni

Looking at today phishing panorama, we are able to identify two diametrically opposed approaches. On the one hand, massive phishing targets as many people as possible with generic and preformed texts. On the other hand, spear phishing targets high-value victims with hand-crafted emails. While nowadays these two worlds partially intersect, we envision a future where Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques will enable attackers to target populous communities with machine-tailored emails. In this paper, we introduce what we call Community Targeted Phishing (CTP), alongside with some workflows that exhibit how NLG techniques can craft such emails. Furthermore, we show how Advanced NLG techniques could provide phishers new powerful tools to bring up to the surface new information from complex data-sets, and use such information to threaten victims' private data.

Nicola Dragoni, Alberto Giaretta, Manuel Mazzara

The Internet of Things makes possible to connect each everyday object to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. From a security and privacy perspective, this tsunami of connectivity represents a disaster, which makes each object remotely hackable. We claim that, in order to tackle this issue, we need to address a new challenge in security: education.

Michele De Donno, Nicola Dragoni, Alberto Giaretta et al.

The 2016 is remembered as the year that showed to the world how dangerous Distributed Denial of Service attacks can be. Gauge of the disruptiveness of DDoS attacks is the number of bots involved: the bigger the botnet, the more powerful the attack. This character, along with the increasing availability of connected and insecure IoT devices, makes DDoS and IoT the perfect pair for the malware industry. In this paper we present the main idea behind AntibIoTic, a palliative solution to prevent DDoS attacks perpetrated through IoT devices.

Nicola Dragoni, Schahram Dustdar, Stephan T. Larsen et al.

The microservices paradigm aims at changing the way in which software is perceived, conceived and designed. One of the foundational characteristics of this new promising paradigm, compared for instance to monolithic architectures, is scalability. In this paper, we present a real world case study in order to demonstrate how scalability is positively affected by re-implementing a monolithic architecture into microservices. The case study is based on the FX Core system, a mission critical system of Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark and one of the leading financial institutions in Northern Europe.

Nicola Dragoni, Ivan Lanese, Stephan Thordal Larsen et al.

The microservice architecture is a style inspired by service-oriented computing that has recently started gaining popularity and that promises to change the way in which software is perceived, conceived and designed. In this paper, we describe the main features of microservices and highlight how these features improve scalability.

Nicola Dragoni, Saverio Giallorenzo, Alberto Lluch Lafuente et al.

Microservices is an architectural style inspired by service-oriented computing that has recently started gaining popularity. Before presenting the current state-of-the-art in the field, this chapter reviews the history of software architecture, the reasons that led to the diffusion of objects and services first, and microservices later. Finally, open problems and future challenges are introduced. This survey primarily addresses newcomers to the discipline, while offering an academic viewpoint on the topic. In addition, we investigate some practical issues and point out some potential solutions.

Mauro Conti, Nicola Dragoni, Sebastiano Gottardo

Recent studies have shown that a significant number of mobile applications, often handling sensitive data such as bank accounts and login credentials, suffers from SSL vulnerabilities. Most of the time, these vulnerabilities are due to improper use of the SSL protocol (in particular, in its \emph{handshake} phase), resulting in applications exposed to man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, we present MITHYS, a system able to: (i) detect applications vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and (ii) protect them against these attacks. We demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal by means of a prototype implementation in Android, named MITHYSApp. A thorough set of experiments assesses the validity of our solution in detecting and protecting mobile applications from man-in-the-middle attacks, without introducing significant overheads. Finally, MITHYSApp does not require any special permissions nor OS modifications, as it operates at the application level. These features make MITHYSApp immediately deployable on a large user base.