Research Seminar “Non-Functional Certification of Modern Distributed Systems” 

The evolution of ICT is a rapid and inexorable process that changed the society landscape several times in the last decades. 
Different technologies have been presented and came to maturity: from distributed to mobile systems, from cloud computing to edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT), from big data to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Modern systems are shaping our life and bringing new services to citizens. For instance, patients are treated and monitored at their homes with smart sensors, energy delivery is governed by smart grids, and smart transportations are changing mobility, to name but a few. The price we pay for these smart services/systems is the increasing risks of security, privacy, and safety attacks, with a new set of serious threats that target all layers of service-based architecture from application to data. In addition, this new and evolving scenario is radically changing the security assurance domain, introducing the need of new compliance and certification techniques that consider the target of certification from a wider perspective, including the development process as well as the machine learning models on which it is built.

The seminar focuses on the most recent developments of certification-based assurance and its role in the definition of trustworthy distributed systems and services. In particular, the seminar presents a multidimensional certification scheme for distributed systems and services, where additional dimensions model relevant aspects (e.g., programming languages and development processes) that significantly contribute to the quality of the certification results.  It also discusses how a multi-dimensional certification scheme enables a new generation of service selection approaches capable to handle a variety of user’s requirements on the full system life cycle, from system development to its operation and maintenance. The talk further presents the next steps in certification-based assurance, presenting the challenges introduced by the need of certifying machine learning models and its application in the context of the PNRR Project MUSA. Finally, it will give some initial insights on the need of defining new data governance techniques that integrate within the service-based system scenario and support a smart balancing between the need to know/share and the need to protect data.
 

About Claudio Agostino Ardagna 

Claudio Agostino Ardagna is Full Professor with the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Director of the CINI National Lab on Big Data, and co-founder of Moon Cloud srl. His research interests are in the areas of cloud-edge security and assurance, and data science, where he published more than 140 contributions in international journals, conference/workshop proceedings, and chapters in international books. He is the winner of the ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) WG STM 2009 Award for the Best Ph.D. Thesis on Security and Trust Management. He has been visiting researcher at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Khalifa University, George Mason University. He is member of the Steering Committee of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, member of the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing and IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, and secretary of the IEEE Technical Committee on Services Computing. He is Program Chair in Chief for IEEE SERVICES 2023.