GEMOM

As messaging connects various system actors together and often spans various localised or distributed domains it is at the heart of security related issues.  From the R&D perspective the mission for GEMOM is to research, develop and deploy a prototype of a messaging platform that is self-organising and self healing and provides secure end to end transactions. GEMOM is resilient and could utilise redundant modules (hot-swap or switch-over) instantaneously without information loss. All these features allow specialist, independent system actors such as watch-dogs, security/situation monitors, routers, and optimisers to remove or replace compromised nodes from the broader network instantly without compromising higher level functionality.

GEMOM was funded under the EU FP7 Programme with a total budget of over €4.5 million. 

Objectives

The core scientific focus of GEMOM is the significant and measurable increase in end-to-end intelligence, security and resilience of complex, distributed information systems.

The primary objective of GEMOM is to research, develop and deploy a prototype of a messaging platform that is evolutionary, self-organising, self healing, scalable and secure.

GEMOM will be resilient and able to utilise redundant modules (hot-swap or switchover) instantly without information loss. These resilience features will allow specialist, independent system actors, viz. watch-dogs, security and situation monitors, routers, and other optimisers, to remove or replace compromised nodes from the broader network instantly without compromising higher level functionality.

GEMOM considers the Publish-Subscribe variant of Message Oriented Middleware to be the predominant one and will focus on issues surrounding that kind of messaging. For completeness GEMOM will provide a synchronous Request and Reply overlay as well.

The advances that GEMOM proposes to make to the area of messaging revolve around the notion of a “fault”. GEMOM extends the notion of fault to include compromised security or inadequate bandwidth availability in the first iteration and compromised abstract notion of “resource” in its final iteration.

Core research focus of GEMOM is ultra-resilience of messaging. GEMOM analyses the following core issues that underpin ultra resilience and so could compromise it as well:

Reliability of message sourcing and delivery. To accommodate this GEMOM offers to handle redundant message feeds, where needed, and redundant delivery paths. In the event of failure switch over to redundant resource would be effectively instantaneous and with no information loss. In addition to entire message broker redundancy GEMOM offers redundancy of certain subsets or messaging segments. As part of its self-healing when redundant components are switched to and used, GEMOM finds and primes other nodes, feeds or paths as new redundant components. In short, GEMOM ensures that there are no single points of failure even as new nodes become compromised and so rendered alien and isolated.

Scalability with respect to message volumes. GEMOM will ensure that scalability is not compromised as redundancy is utilised. Switchover to redundant components will preserve scalability.

Replicating structural and dynamic properties of security metrics. One particular GEMOM setup might be configured with a certain security layout in place. GEMOM will research issues and deploy innovative solutions to ensure that the security profiles of overall system and individual message paths and dynamics are not compromised as a result of failovers. Namely, GEMOM will be capable of fully replicating structural and dynamic properties of security policies.

Process zoning and overall encapsulation to an arbitrary level. Where the economy of the implemented solution carries higher weighting GEMOM allows for separation of cheaper messaging (still scaleable, resilient and self-healing) on one side but fully fledged monitoring, management and maintenance on another side. Namely, GEMOM allows for process zoning and overall encapsulation to an arbitrary level.

Pre-emptive vulnerability testing and vulnerability updating. Whether by accident or as the result of deliberate cyber attack, components executing on different computers across different trust boundaries may interact in an unforeseen way or expose a vulnerability that an attacker could exploit. Pre-emptive detection of known and unknown vulnerabilities needs tools that can analyse the deployed middleware, client server applications and web service based applications both statically and dynamically, and this will be provided by GEMOM. This will also allow checking for new vulnerabilities when they are reported.

Message oriented middleware acts at a trust boundary and is often not just a passive entity. It combines and transforms data and sends it to other components. Message oriented middleware is therefore an important location to be guarded and for guarding the components with which it interacts. GEMOM will investigate and develop novel techniques that can automate the intelligent checking of the deployed GEMOM system for robustness to misconfiguration, erroneous data and vulnerabilities to cyber attacks in the context of the deployed environment.

Industrial Partners

Q-Sphere in the UK

HP European Innovation Centre in Italy

Sempla in Italy

JRC – Capital Management and Research in Germany

TXT eSolutions in Italy

Research & University Partners

Queen Mary University of London in UK

Norsk Regnesentral (Norwegian Computing Centre) is a private, independent, non-profit research foundation with a scientific staff of around 50 research scientists in computer science and statistical modelling.

National Inter-university Telecommunication Consortium in Italy

VTT – Technical Research Centre of Finland