Organisations, small and large, increasingly rely upon cloud environments to supply their ICT needs because clouds provide a better incremental cost structure, resource elasticity and simpler management. This trend is set to continue as increasingly information collected from mobile devices and smart environments including homes, infrastructures and smart-cities is uploaded and processed in cloud environments. Services delivered to users are also deployed in the cloud as this provides better scaleability and in some cases permits migration closer to the point of access for reduced latency. Clouds are therefore an attractive target for organised and skilled cyber-attacks. They are also more vulnerable as they host environments from multiple tenant organisations with different interests and different risk aversion profiles. Yet clouds also offer opportunities for better protection both pro-actively and reactively in response to a persistent attack. This project aims to develop novel techniques for intelligent cloud protection by advancing the state of the art in system modelling at run time, attack scenarios based analysis, novel techniques for selecting countermeasures and remedial actions and novel techniques for re-perimeterisation of the cloud environment. The methodology adopted combines fundamental research on knowledge representation, probabilistic analysis and machine learning with empirical and experimental studies in an industrial test-bed environment. Additionally, the project also aims to achieve a better understanding of the business models and incentives involved in the relationships between cloud tenants and hosting organisations in the provision of security services based on measures of cost, risk and value and to propose new models that facilitate sharing of risk and exchange of security relevant information, which would in turn allow to simplify security management and provide better protection.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The unprecedented growth of optical fibre infrastructure in recent decades has underpinned telecommunications and the Internet, making possible broadband communications, e-commerce, video-on-demand and streaming media, tele-presence and high performance distributed computing. It has dramatically changed the whole landscape of public, business and government activities, stimulating relentless traffic growth. This necessitates a clear strategy to sustain the growth in information-carrying digital communications infrastructure. Infrastructure is the backbone of our economydigital communication infrastructure needs urgent attention since it underpins almost every aspect of economy and society. It should be flexible, adaptable, capable of continuous and smooth evolution with well-understood performance limits over its full life-cycle. This outline proposal addresses the first of the main cross cutting challenges of TI3 - The communications bottleneck. A future intelligent information infrastructure needs to intelligently manage massive amounts of data, to ensure efficient communications and exploit the content and information that will be available. It is in this context that we view this proposal as vital to the development of the future of information society. The role of fibre communications, providing the capacity for the lion's share of the total information traffic, is vital. However, to make the most efficient use of the optical fibre infrastructure requires that it can be accessed transparently, and on demand, by users, data, services and applications. To ensure this requires a completely different approach to the design of the communications infrastructure. It requires the optical resources (which include transmitters, receivers, fibre communication channels and routers) to be abstracted in a way to ensure the seamlessness of resource. The infrastructure will be treated as a service, accessible over the cloud. Optical layer capabilities such as capacity, latency, and spectrum availability could then be abstracted, become transparently accessible by using a unified interface. This requires the development of a new framework capable of uniformly representing and abstracting the heterogeneous optical resources in the optical layer, taking into account the various attributes and constraints of the optical infrastructure. Current optical network abstraction and virtualization research activities have focused on optical systems which are designed and optimised to have a fixed number of channels communicating at a given speed optimised over a defined set of distances. However, to maximise the use of optical infrastructure requires a flexible approach about how it is allocated, for how long and at what rate. The complexity and adaptability of advance optical communication systems (variable and adaptive modulation formats, rates, flexible nodes, etc.) pose numerous challenges on choosing the suitable description format and level of abstraction. Such process will simplify the control of underlying complex optical systems and in turn transparently provide services to the users with diverse business models and needs in a flexible, reconfigurable and intelligent. The framework developed in the course of will have insight about how to maximise the capacity of the infrastructure, whilst minimising energy and delay enabling transformational applications and services to be delivered intelligently and seamlessly.

Future wireless systems are expected to involve a plethora of small, low-cost communication nodes which will be widely distributed in the infrastructure of cities to provide truly pervasive and seamless communication and other services such as sensor networks. Perhaps the most fundamental challenge in these systems as in all wireless communications is channel fading. In these pervasive wireless systems, however, the individual nodes may be equipped with only a single antenna due to cost and size constraints. One powerful strategy to combat channel fading in the above systems is to apply space-time block coding (STBC) in a distributed fashion: creating and harnessing space diversity by enabling a cluster of wireless nodes to relay signals for each other and effectively create a distributed (or virtual) antenna array - with each relay node serving as one antenna element in the STBC array. A major challenge to distributed STBC is that the system is fundamentally asynchronous: signals from the relay nodes tend to arrive at the destination node at different times. Most existing works so far have focused on recerver based schemes. To tackle the above challenge more effectively, this proposal will employ a more fundamental and flexible approach: developing coding and modulation structures which are inherently delay-tolerant (coherent or non-coherent). In this way we move at least part of the problem from the receiver to the transmitter. Considering the fact that most wireless nodes are powered by batteries, equally important is to ensure low complexity both at the relays and at the receiver. The results of this project will enable the so far largely theoretical benefits of cooperative diversity to be realised in practical wireless networks.

The unprecedented growth of optical fibre infrastructure in recent decades has underpinned telecommunications and the Internet, making possible broadband communications, e-commerce, video-on-demand and streaming media, tele-presence and high performance distributed computing. It has dramatically changed the whole landscape of public, business and government activities, stimulating relentless traffic growth. This necessitates a clear strategy to sustain the growth in information-carrying digital communications infrastructure. Infrastructure is the backbone of our economydigital communication infrastructure needs urgent attention since it underpins almost every aspect of economy and society. It should be flexible, adaptable, capable of continuous and smooth evolution with well-understood performance limits over its full life-cycle. This outline proposal addresses the first of the main cross cutting challenges of TI3 - The communications bottleneck. A future intelligent information infrastructure needs to intelligently manage massive amounts of data, to ensure efficient communications and exploit the content and information that will be available. It is in this context that we view this proposal as vital to the development of the future of information society. The role of fibre communications, providing the capacity for the lion's share of the total information traffic, is vital. However, to make the most efficient use of the optical fibre infrastructure requires that it can be accessed transparently, and on demand, by users, data, services and applications. To ensure this requires a completely different approach to the design of the communications infrastructure. It requires the optical resources (which include transmitters, receivers, fibre communication channels and routers) to be abstracted in a way to ensure the seamlessness of resource. The infrastructure will be treated as a service, accessible over the cloud. Optical layer capabilities such as capacity, latency, and spectrum availability could then be abstracted, become transparently accessible by using a unified interface. This requires the development of a new framework capable of uniformly representing and abstracting the heterogeneous optical resources in the optical layer, taking into account the various attributes and constraints of the optical infrastructure. Current optical network abstraction and virtualization research activities have focused on optical systems which are designed and optimised to have a fixed number of channels communicating at a given speed optimised over a defined set of distances. However, to maximise the use of optical infrastructure requires a flexible approach about how it is allocated, for how long and at what rate. The complexity and adaptability of advance optical communication systems (variable and adaptive modulation formats, rates, flexible nodes, etc.) pose numerous challenges on choosing the suitable description format and level of abstraction. Such process will simplify the control of underlying complex optical systems and in turn transparently provide services to the users with diverse business models and needs in a flexible, reconfigurable and intelligent. The framework developed in the course of will have insight about how to maximise the capacity of the infrastructure, whilst minimising energy and delay enabling transformational applications and services to be delivered intelligently and seamlessly.