A cyber warfare perspective on risks related to health IoT devices and contact tracing.

The wide use of IT resources to assess and manage the recent COVID-19 pandemic allows to increase the effectiveness of the countermeasures and the pervasiveness of monitoring and prevention. Unfortunately, the literature reports that IoT devices, a widely adopted technology for these applications, are characterized by security vulnerabilities that are difficult to manage at the state level. Comparable problems exist for related technologies that leverage smartphones, such as contact tracing applications, and non-medical health monitoring devices. In analogous situations, these vulnerabilities may be exploited in the cyber domain to overload the crisis management systems with false alarms and to interfere with the interests of target countries, with consequences on their economy and their political equilibria. In this paper we analyze the potential threat to an example subsystem to show how these influences may impact it and evaluate a possible consequence.

Performance evaluation for the design of a hybrid cloud based distance synchronous and asynchronous learning architecture.

The COVID-19 emergency suddenly obliged schools and universities around the world to deliver on-line lectures and services. While the urgency of response resulted in a fast and massive adoption of standard, public on-line platforms, generally owned by big players in the digital services market, this does not sufficiently take into account privacy-related and security-related issues and potential legal problems about the legitimate exploitation of the intellectual rights about contents. However, the experience brought to attention a vast set of issues, which have been addressed by implementing these services by means of private platforms. This work presents a modeling and evaluation framework, defined on a set of high-level, management-oriented parameters and based on a Vectorial Auto Regressive Fractional (Integrated) Moving Average based approach, to support the design of distance learning architectures. The purpose of this framework is to help decision makers to evaluate the requirements and the costs of hybrid cloud technology solutions. Furthermore, it aims at providing a coarse grain reference organization integrating low-cost, long-term storage management services to implement a viable and accessible history feature for all materials. The proposed solution has been designed bearing in mind the ecosystem of Italian universities. A realistic case study has been shaped on the needs of an important, generalist, polycentric Italian university, where some of the authors of this paper work.