Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) have recently been faced with increased compliance costs as both national and international bodies bring their due diligence compliance requirements inline with those of traditional financial entities. The `travel rule', as defined by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is prominent amongst these and has created a need for efficient compliance solutions for VASPs. In this paper we improve upon current travel rule compliance solutions by utilising a mixed centralised and decentralised approach to provide trust and reduce the compliance burden on VASPs. Moreover, we provide a generic system capable of ensuring compliance with FATF recommendations as well other sanctions and embargoes that impact VASP trading relationships.
Increasing security awareness is a popular defense strategy adopted by companies against cyber attacks. Testbeds that support the so called cybersecurity exercises, strongly rely on virtualization technologies to faithfully reproduce real world scenarios. OS virtualization has proved to be a good solution to improve scalability, but it draws the line on the categories of reproducible vulnerabilities. In this paper, we tackle the challenges arising from the introduction of OS virtualization. We propose a solution that allows to rely as much as possible on the use of containers, as well as integrate them with legacy virtualization approaches when the vulnerabilities to be emulated do not lend themselves to a container-based implementation. We use the Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) paradigm to enable automation of both provisioning and configuration of the emulated scenarios, as well as integrate heterogeneous virtualization technologies. After showing the design and implementation of the proposed solution, we discuss how our approach leverages a cyber range instantiation platform, that can be designed and tested on a single laptop, before being deployed on an enterprise system infrastructure.
With COVID-19, the interest for digital interactions has raised, putting in turn real-time (or low-latency) codecs into a new light. Most of the codec research has been traditionally focusing on coding efficiency, while very little literature exist on real-time codecs. It is shown how the speed at which content is made available impacts both latency and throughput. The authors introduce a new test set up, integrating a paced reader, which allows to run codec in the same condition as real-time media capture. Quality measurements using VMAF, as well as multiple speed measurements are made on encoding of HD and full HD video sequences, both at 25 fps and 50 fps to compare the respective performances of several implementations of the H.264, H.265, VP8, VP9 and AV1 codecs.
Our paper describes a novel architecture using dynamic 5G network slices to support prioritized First Responder communications. Today, prioritized users are identified through their special Access Class (AC) 14 designation in their handsets as the basis for the Wireless Priority Service (WPS). However, under extreme events this best efforts approach to network access may not be sufficient, potentially resulting in loss of life or property. The 5G network has provisions for allocating virtual slices of the access network, most often for media type quality of service, such as non-real time video versus low-latency control versus low-bandwidth, delay tolerant messaging. This paper describes an approach to using dynamic 5G network slicing using the number of active AC-14 devices in a region to trigger the resource characteristics of a network slice, irrespective of media type needed for a given session.
Numerous works have modeled the synthetic power system network that represents the U.S. electricity transmission system. In this paper, the Texas 2000 synthetic bus model is adopted as a use case; however, the Texas 2000 synthetic bus model only contains the physical elements of the electric grid, such as power buses, substations, and transmission lines. Our research seeks to model the communication infrastructure for this synthetic grid to create a comprehensive cyber-physical model of the electric grid. Our communication model relies on the information gathered from the synthetic power system model as well as the network topologies used in substations, utility control centers, and balancing authorities like the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). A Python program generates the communication model as a collection of JSON objects with lists of nodes and links, similar to the Cyber-Physical Topology Language (CPTL). The nodes represent the cyber components such as routers, firewalls, switches, relay controllers, relays, or remote terminal units (RTUs). The links represent the communication channel types such as microwave links, Ethernet, or MPLS/fiber links. Finally, the proposed communication model is applied to one region in the Texas 2000 synthetic model and Splunk is used to create the visualization for the cyber-physical model of this region.
