A conceptual model for the design and evaluation of Holistic Security Ecosystems is introduced together with a proof of concept test bed for exploring the social, cognitive, geographic and informational dynamics in the emergence of such large scale interdependent meta-organizations. The model is based on recent developments of the holonic paradigm of cross-organizational workflow coordination a...

Coupled with the obesity epidemic, food insecurity presents a public health and social crisis. The United States’ industrialized food system embodies an unsustainable network of production and unequal distribution of food creating threats to both the natural environment and human development. Ecological, economic, and social systems are interdependent and their relationships to food security ar...

Security administrators face the challenge of designing, deploying and maintaining a variety of configuration files related to security systems, especially in large-scale networks. These files have heterogeneous syntaxes and follow differing semantic concepts. Nevertheless, they are interdependent due to security services having to cooperate and their configuration to be consistent with each ot...

Embedded systems are increasingly pervasive, interdependent and in many cases critical to our every day life and safety. As such devices are more and more subject to attacks, new protection mechanisms are needed to provide the required resilience and dependency at low cost. Remote attestation (RA) is a software-hardware mechanism that securely checks the internal state of remote embedded device...

We study cascading failures in a system comprising interdependent networks/systems, in which nodes rely on other nodes both in the same system and in other systems to perform their function. The (inter-)dependence among nodes is modeled using a dependence graph, where the degree vector of a node determines the number of other nodes it can potentially cause to fail in each system through aforeme...

In today’s world, where most of the critical infrastructures (CIs) are based on distributed systems, security failures have become very common, even within large corporations. The critical infrastructures are tightly interconnected, mutually dependent, and are exposed everyday to new risks. These (inter)dependencies generate potential cascading effects that may spread a malfunction or an attack...

Secure systems are usually complex since stateful security mechanisms like authentication and authorization have to be integrated into the functional behavior at various places. The security operations are, in general, interdependent such that events at one place may influence the behavior at other places. Thus, the composed specification of a system is neither easy to understand nor to analyze...

Controllability of complex networks has been a hot topic in recent years. Real networks regarded as interdependent networks are always coupled together by multiple networks. The cascading process of interdependent networks including interdependent failure and overload failure will destroy the robustness of controllability for the whole network. Therefore, the optimization of the robustness of i...