Markus Tauber

Elisabeth Bauer, Oliver Schluga, Silia Maksuti et al.

The popularity of cloud based Infrastructure-as-a- Service (IaaS) solutions is becoming increasingly popular. However, since IaaS providers and customers interact in a flexible and scalable environment, security remains a serious concern. To handle such security issues, defining a set of security parameters in the service level agreements (SLA) between both, IaaS provider and customer, is of utmost importance. In this paper, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) guidelines are evaluated to extract a set of security parameters for IaaS. Furthermore, the level of applicability and implementation of this set is used to assess popular industrial and open-source IaaS cloud platforms, respectively VMware and OpenStack. Both platforms provide private clouds, used as backend infrastructures in Industry 4.0 application scenarios. The results serve as initial work to identify a security baseline and research needs for creating secure cloud environments for Industry 4.0.

Adam Kovari, Yasin Ghafourian, Csaba Hegedus et al.

As artificial intelligence (AI) regulations evolve and the regulatory landscape develops and becomes more complex, ensuring compliance with ethical guidelines and legal frameworks remains a challenge for AI developers. This paper introduces an AI-driven self-assessment chatbot designed to assist users in navigating the European Union AI Act and related standards. Leveraging a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, the chatbot enables real-time, context-aware compliance verification by retrieving relevant regulatory texts and providing tailored guidance. By integrating both public and proprietary standards, it streamlines regulatory adherence, reduces complexity, and fosters responsible AI development. The paper explores the chatbot's architecture, comparing naive and graph-based RAG models, and discusses its potential impact on AI governance.

Igor Ivkic, Patrizia Sailer, Antonios Gouglidis et al.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are formed through interconnected components capable of computation, communication, sensing and changing the physical world. The development of these systems poses a significant challenge since they have to be designed in a way to ensure cyber-security without impacting their performance. This article presents the Security Cost Modelling Framework (SCMF) and shows supported by an experimental study how it can be used to measure, normalise and aggregate the overall performance of a CPS. Unlike previous studies, our approach uses different metrics to measure the overall performance of a CPS and provides a methodology for normalising the measurement results of different units to a common Cost Unit. Moreover, we show how the Security Costs can be extracted from the overall performance measurements which allows to quantify the overhead imposed by performing security-related tasks. Furthermore, we describe the architecture of our experimental testbed and demonstrate the applicability of SCMF in an experimental study. Our results show that measuring the overall performance and extracting the security costs using SCMF can serve as basis to redesign interactions to achieve the same overall goal at less costs.

Igor Ivkic, Harald Pichler, Mario Zsilak et al.

In Industry 4.0, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are formed by components, which are interconnected with each other over the Internet of Things (IoT). The resulting capabilities of sensing and affecting the physical world offer a vast range of opportunities, yet, at the same time pose new security challenges. To address these challenges there are various IoT Frameworks, which offer solutions for managing and controlling IoT-components and their interactions. In this regard, providing security for an interaction usually requires performing additional security-related tasks (e.g. authorisation, encryption, etc.) to prevent possible security risks. Research currently focuses more on designing and developing these frameworks and does not satisfactorily provide methodologies for evaluating the resulting costs of providing security. In this paper we propose an initial approach for measuring the resulting costs of providing security for interacting IoT-components by using a Security Cost Modelling Framework. Furthermore, we describe the necessary building blocks of the framework and provide an experimental design showing how it could be used to measure security costs at runtime.

Igor Ivkic, Andreas Mauthe, Markus Tauber

In times of Industry 4.0 and cyber-physical systems (CPS) providing security is one of the biggest challenges. A cyber attack launched at a CPS poses a huge threat, since a security incident may affect both the cyber and the physical world. Since CPS are very flexible systems, which are capable of adapting to environmental changes, it is important to keep an overview of the resulting costs of providing security. However, research regarding CPS currently focuses more on engineering secure systems and does not satisfactorily provide approaches for evaluating the resulting costs. This paper presents an interaction-based model for evaluating security costs in a CPS. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates in a use case driven study, how this approach could be used to model the resulting costs for guaranteeing security.

David Hofbauer, Igor Ivkic, Silia Maksuti et al.

The onward development of information and communication technology has led to a new industrial revolution called Industry 4.0. This revolution involves Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS), which consist of intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems that may be able to adapt themselves autonomously in a production environment. At the moment, machines in industrial environments are often not connected to the internet, which thus needs a point-to-point connection to access the device if necessary. Through Industry 4.0, these devices should enable remote access for smart maintenance through a connection to the outside world. However, this connection opens the gate for possible cyber-attacks and thus raises the question about providing security for these environments. Therefore, this paper used an adapted approach based on SixSigma to solve this security problem by investigating security standards. Security requirements were gathered and mapped to controls from well known security standards, formed into a catalog. This catalog includes assessment information to check how secure a solution for a use case is and also includes a link to an estimation method for implementation cost. Thus this papers outcome shows how to make Industry 4.0 use cases secure by fulfilling security standard controls and how to estimate the resulting implementation costs.

Roland Pellegrini, Igor Ivkic, Markus Tauber

In a world, where complexity increases on a daily basis the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) cloud model seams to take countermeasures. In comparison to other cloud models, the fast evolving FaaS increasingly abstracts the underlying infrastructure and refocuses on the application logic. This trend brings huge benefits in application and performance but comes with difficulties for benchmarking cloud applications. In this position paper, we present an initial investigation of benchmarking FaaS in close to reality production systems. Furthermore, we outline the architectural design including the necessary benchmarking metrics. We also discuss the possibility of using the proposed framework for identifying security vulnerabilities.

Igor Ivkic, Stephan Wolfauer, Thomas Oberhofer et al.

In a world, as complex and constantly changing as ours cloud computing is a driving force for shaping the IT landscape and changing the way we do business. Current trends show a world of people, things and services all digitally interconnected via the Internet of Things (IoT). This applies in particular to an industrial environment where smart devices and intelligent services pave the way for smart factories and smart businesses. This paper investigates in a use case driven study the potential of making use of smart devices to enable direct, automated and voice-controlled smart businesses. Furthermore, the paper presents an initial investigation on methodologies for measuring costs of cyber security controls for cloud services.

Igor Ivkic, Alexander Wöhrer, Markus Tauber

Rapid technological progress in computer sciences finds solutions and at the same time creates ever more complex requirements. Due to an evolving complexity todays programming languages provide powerful frameworks which offer standard solutions for recurring tasks to assist the programmer and to avoid the re-invention of the wheel with so-called out-of-the-box-features. In this paper, we propose a way of comparing different programming paradigms on a theoretical, technical and practical level. Furthermore, the paper presents the results of an initial comparison of two representative programming approaches, both in the closed SAP environment.