Section: Application Domains

Security is Required Everywhere

With the infiltration of computers and software in almost all aspects of our modern life, security can nowadays be seen as an absolutely general concern. As such, the results of the research targeted by CIDRE apply to a wide range of domains. It is clear that critical systems, in which security (and safety) is a major concern, can benefit from ideas such as dynamic security policy monitoring. On the other hand, systems used by the general public (basically, the internet and services such as web or cloud services, social networks, location-based services, etc.) can also benefit from results obtained by CIDRE, in particular to solve some of the privacy issues raised by these systems that manipulate huge amount of personal data. In addition, systems are getting more and more complex, decentralized, distributed, or spontaneous. Cloud computing, in particular, brings many challenges that could benefit from ideas, approaches and solutions studied by CIDRE in the context of distributed systems.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and in particular Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition are also new application domains for intrusion detection. The Stuxnet attack has emphasized the vulnerability of such critical systems which are not totally isolated anymore. Securing ICS is challenging since modifications of the systems, for example to patch them, are often not possible. High availability requirements also often conflict with preventive approaches. In this case, security monitoring is appealing to protect such systems against malicious activities. Intrusion detection in ICS is not fundamentally different from traditional approaches. However, new hypotheses and constraints need to be taken into account, which also bring interesting new research challenges.