A Journey into Security Certification From the Cloud to Artificial Intelligence

This book, authored by some of the pioneers in the security certification domain, provides a foundational knowledge base for designing and deploying effective security certification schemes for cloud-edge distributed systems. It gives readers unique and essential insight into the history of security certification and its evolution from static to dynamic models. The book helps readers to understand the importance of security certification across distributed system evolution from cloud-based to artificial intelligence-machine learning systems. It covers in full the certification of cloud-based composite services, discussing the role of multi-factor certification. It also emphasizes processes for continuously certifying services across system and context changes, as well as the certification of the deployment environment and development process and their impact on the overall cloud service certification. The book considers and challenges existing security certification schemes for cloud services, discussing issues and gaps when applied to modern systems in the cloud-edge continuum and built on artificial intelligence. Readers will become familiar with the challenges in certifying cloud-edge distributed systems and machine learning-based systems.
This book also provides actionable insight to readers who manage modern security systems. Security controls have grown in size and complexity, requiring reliable and sustainable certification schemes to support varying quality standards and produce compliant products. It covers the logic behind security standards and the evaluation criteria of main certification standards, further discussing the evolution and corresponding certification of distributed systems towards cloud, cloud-edge, and artificial intelligence. The book teaches readers how to build faster, scalable, and more reliable cloud-edge distributed systems and beyond.   

Preface.- Introduction.- History of Software Security Certification.-  Evidence-based Certification of Cloud Services.-  Certification of Modern Distributed Systems.- Beyond Cloud Service Certification.- Conclusions and Open Issues.

Marco Anisetti is Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Università degli Studi di Milano. His research interests are in the area of Computational Intelligence and its application to the design and evaluation of complex systems and services. Specifically, he has been investigating innovative solutions for security assurance and software/service certification for modern Edge and AI-assisted systems. In this area, he defined new schemes for continuous and incremental Cloud/Web service security certification based on the distributed assurance evaluation architecture that had percolated in his Moon Cloud spin-off. He is the winner of the 2010 GIRPR award for the best Ph.D. thesis and the 2009 Chester Sall Award from the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society. He is an editorial board member of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, and Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS)  at Elsevier. He has been a program committee member for several international conferences and workshops in the area of distributed systems, service-based architectures, and security. He contributed to a number of EU projects including FP7 ASSET4SOA and FP7 CUMULUS focused on certification of services and H2020 CONCORDIA investigating security assurance for modern systems.

Claudio Agostino Ardagna is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, the Director of the CINI National Lab on Data Science, and co-founder of Moon Cloud srl. His research interests are in the areas of distributed systems security and assurance, cloud-edge and AI/ML certification, and data science. 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 an invited professor at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and a visiting researcher at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Khalifa University, and George Mason University. He is a member of the Steering Committee for 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 has been Program Chair of several international conferences and workshops in the area of distributed systems and security and privacy. He co–authored with Professors Ernesto Damiani and Nabil El Ioini the book Open Source Systems Security Certification, published by Springer.

Ernesto Damiani serves as the acting Dean of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Center for Cyber Physical Systems (C2PS) at Khalifa University in the UAE. He is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, where he leads the SESAR research lab.  His research interests include secure service-oriented architectures (SOA), certifiable robust Artificial intelligence and Data Analytics models, and cyber-physical systems security. Dr. Damiani has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Service-oriented Computing and as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. He is a senior member of the IEEE and served as Vice-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Industrial Informatics. In 2008, Dr. Damiani was nominated as an ACM Distinguished Scientist and received the Chester Sall Award from the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. Later, he received a doctorate honoris causa from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) of Lyon, France, for his contributions to Big Data analysis platforms and architectures. In 2022, Ernesto was awarded the rank of Officer of the Order of the Star of Italy for his contributions to international scientific collaboration in AI. 

Nabil El Ioini is an Associate Professor within the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia. His research interests lie the area of  cloud computing, cyber-security, and blockchain technology. Dr. El Ioini's research endeavors center around designing innovative architectural patterns tailored to meet the evolving demands of Edge computing and distributed applications. With a keen focus on scalability, orchestration, security, and privacy, he and his team successfully developed cloud-edge solutions leveraging mainstream technologies such as containers and blockchain. His scholarly contributions have been widely recognized, with his work featured in numerous conferences and journals.