Search

Patients with established cardiovascular (CV) disease may suffer further CV events, despite receiving optimal medical treatment. Although platelet inhibition plays a central role in the prevention of new events, the use of anticoagulant therapies to reduce events in atheromatous disease has, until recently, been overlooked. The recent Rivaroxaban for the Prevention of Major Cardiovascular Events in Coronary or Peripheral Artery Disease (COMPASS) trial showed that rivaroxaban 2.5 mg twice daily given with low-dose aspirin reduces the incidence of the composite endpoint of stroke, heart attack, and death in patients with stable coronary artery disease. Although there are some limitations to the study, COMPASS offers promising conclusions and may change secondary prevention in patients with stable CV disease. This article reviews the results of the COMPASS study and how these results may affect patient management in everyday clinical practice.

The articles in this special issue, together with those in the companion issue, highlight the need for large, complex observational and empirical studies and represent the kind of studies that will advance our understanding of cybersecurity economics.

Cyberactors are increasingly adopting traditional and innovative security measures to protect valuable information in the cyberworld. Information--and any aspect of it, such as its abundance, distortion, misuse, and value--governs the cyberworld. In this context, new actors are emerging alongside traditional ones with an essential role for intermediaries, who aim to systematically identify, handle, filter, monitor, and disseminate information. Cyberactors' changing roles highlight how interaction approaches, business models, and organizational practices relate to cybersecurity economics.

Vascular rings are rare anomalies accounting for 1% to 3% of all congenital heart diseases with a similar frequency in both sexes, which can result in a variable degree of extrinsic compression of the trachea and esophagus. We report the case of a 46-year-old woman with symptomatic dyspnea and double aortic arch that caused esophageal tracheal compression. Considering the little impact of the functional vascular anomaly in our case, a conservative approach was adopted with clinical and functional annual follow-up.

This paper is concerned with the problem of security and privacy assurance in cloud ecosystems. Different controls are deployed in order to guarantee security and privacy across cloud ecosystems. It is yet challenging to assess their effectiveness in operation. Therefore, it is necessary to devise methodologies and technologies for providing assurance of whether security and privacy controls are effective and appropriate for specific cloud ecosystems. This paper discusses the rationale and requirements for evidence-based security and privacy assurance. It also discusses the underlining mechanisms shaping a software defined storage system for gathering evidence drawn from a cloud ecosystem. It explains such requirements and mechanisms in the context of a sample use case. In conclusion, it provides insights for evidence-based security and privacy assurance of cloud ecosystems.

This paper concerns decision-making processes that rely on trust. In particular, it analyzes how different aspects of trust (e.g., trust, trustworthiness, trustworthy evidence) influence trust decisions, and acting on them eventually. It proposes a trust decision model that structures the analysis of contextualized trust problems. Rather than seeking a general definition of trust, this paper advocates the necessity to have a structured way to analyze and characterize situational trust problems systematically.

Designing secure and dependable IT systems requires a deep analysis of organizational as well as social aspects of the environment where the system will operate. Domain experts and analysts often face security and dependability (S&D) issues they have already encountered before. These concerns require the design of S&D patterns to facilitate designers when developing IT systems. This article presents the experience in designing S&D organizational patterns, which was gained in the course of an industry lead EU project. The authors use an agent-goal-oriented modeling framework (i.e., the SI* framework) to analyze organizational settings jointly with technical functionalities. This framework can assist domain experts and analysts in designing S&D patterns from their experience, validating them by proof-of-concept implementations, and applying them to increase the security level of the system.

Understanding risk in technology involves analyzing of diverse socio-technical aspects and their interaction. This is due to the risk complexity, which often inhibits the effectiveness as well as the applicability of purely technological risk analysis (as distinct from organizational risk analysis). Diverse accounts of risk in technology advocate and argue about different aspects of technology risk. Although a first insight of these accounts might result in controversial understandings of risk, a further analysis highlights how they often point out similar (or compatible) conclusions about technology risk. This paper draws on diverse accounts of technology risk. Multidisciplinary perspectives of risk allow us to identify and define three classes of socio-technical hazards: boundary, evolutionary and performativity hazards. These classes enhance our understanding of technology risk. They highlight out how diverse accounts of risk refer to different granularities of risk – (technological) microscopic and (organizational) macroscopic levels of risk analysis. The benefit of understanding and capturing socio-technical accounts of risk is twofold. On the one hand, it points toward an interdisciplinary account of technology risk. On the other hand, it provides a means for structuring risk analysis according to multidisciplinary perspectives. The combination of different levels of risk analysis enhances our understanding of the risk of technology innovation with respect to classes of socio-technical hazards.

The Glossary of Terms and Definitions captures a shared multidisciplinary understanding within the EU FP7 Cloud Accountability Project (A4Cloud). It consists of the key terms that have been identified by the A4Cloud’s Accountability Conceptual Framework. The definitions in the glossary have been drawn from relevant research literature, standards or domain specific references (e.g. data protection, cloud computing, information security, privacy, etc.). The A4Cloud’s Accountability Conceptual Framework has proposed (or revised) definitions of those terms that are central to concept of accountability (and related attributes). The glossary is the result of a collaborative effort of the A4Cloud project. The final glossary consists of over 150 terms (drawn from an initial list of over 700 terms) selected for their relevance to accountability. It consists of the core accountability terms that have been defined and used across the A4Cloud project.

Cloud computing represents a major shift in the way Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is deployed and utilised across industries. Alongside the technological developments, organisations need to adapt to emerging operational needs associated with data governance, policy and responsibility, as well as compliance with regulatory regimes that may be multi-jurisdictional in nature. This paper is concerned with data governance in cloud ecosystems. It characterises the problem of data governance due to emerging challenges (and threats) in the cloud. It advocates an accountability-based approach for data stewardship. It defines accountability and introduces a model consisting of attributes, practices and mechanisms. The accountability model underpins an accountability framework supporting data governance. This paper also discusses emerging relationships between accountability, risk and trust. The overall objective of the proposed accountability-based approach to data governance is to support a transparent and trustworthy cloud.

The future development of air traffic management (ATM), set by the ATM 2000+ Strategy, involves a structural revision of ATM processes, a new ATM concept and a system approach for the ATM network. This requires ATM services to go through significant structural, operational and cultural changes that will contribute towards the ATM 2000+ Strategy. Moreover, from a technology viewpoint, future ATM services will employ new systems forming the emergent ATM architecture underlying and supporting the European Commission's Single European Sky Initiative. Introducing safety relevant systems in ATM contexts requires us to understand the risk involved in order to mitigate the impact of possible failures. This paper is concerned with some limitations of safety analysis with respect to operational aspects of introducing new systems (functionalities).

Cloud computing has emerged as a promising technology to drive innovation and leverage business development in various sectorial applications. Large scale enterprises and SMEs take advantage of cloud computing in order to benefit from cost-effective technological deployments allowing flexibility and scalability, and to offer added value solutions to their customers. However, customers’ perceptions of the risks affecting data and IT governance, especially in complex service provision ecosystems, result in a lack of trust in the ability of the providers to handle their assets in a responsible way. This paper elaborates on the general aspects of an accountability-based approach, which can facilitate organisations dealing with the cloud to comply with applicable legislation and provide more evidence that confidential and/or personal data are handled in accordance with relevant data protection legislation.

Accountability has emerged as a critical concept related to data protection in cloud ecosystems. It is necessary to maintain chains of accountability across cloud ecosystems. This is to enhance the confidence in the trust that cloud actors have while operating in the cloud. This paper is concerned with accountability in the cloud. It presents a conceptual model, consisting of attributes, practices and mechanisms for accountability in the cloud. The proposed model allows us to explain, in terms of accountability attributes, cloud-mediated interactions between actors. This forms the basis for characterizing accountability relationships between cloud actors, and hence chains of accountability in cloud ecosystems.

Cloud governance, and in particular data governance in the cloud, relies on different technical and organizational practices and procedures, such as policy enforcement, risk management, incident management and remediation. The concept of accountability encompasses such practices, and is essential for enhancing security and trustworthiness in the cloud. Besides this, proper measurement of cloud services, both at a technical and governance level, is a distinctive aspect of the cloud computing model. Hence, a natural problem that arises is how to measure the impact on accountability of the procedures held in practice by organizations that participate in the cloud ecosystem. In this paper, we describe a metamodel for addressing the problem of measuring accountability properties for cloud computing, as discussed and defined by the Cloud Accountability Project (A4Cloud). The goal of this metamodel is to act as a language for describing: (i) accountability properties in terms of actions between entities, and (ii) metrics for measuring the fulfillment of such properties. It also allows the recursive decomposition of properties and metrics, from a high-level and abstract world to a tangible and measurable one. Finally, we illustrate our proposal of the metamodel by modelling the transparency property, and define some metrics for it.

This paper is concerned with accountability in cloud ecosystems. The separation between data and data subjects as well as the exchange of data between cloud consumers and providers increases the complexity of data governance in cloud ecosystems, a problem which is exacerbated by emerging threats and vulnerabilities. This paper discusses how accountability addresses emerging issues and legal perspectives in cloud ecosystems. In particular, it introduces an accountability model tailored to the cloud. It presents on-going work within the Cloud Accountability Project, highlighting both legal and technical aspects of accountability.

Designing secure and dependable IT systems requires a deep analysis of organizational as well as social aspects of the environment where the system will operate. Domain experts and analysts often face security and dependability (S&D) issues they have already encountered before. These concerns require the design of S&D patterns to facilitate designers when developing IT systems. This article presents the experience in designing S&D organizational patterns, which was gained in the course of an industry lead EU project. The authors use an agent-goal-oriented modeling framework (i.e., the SI* framework) to analyze organizational settings jointly with technical functionalities. This framework can assist domain experts and analysts in designing S&D patterns from their experience, validating them by proof-of-concept implementations, and applying them to increase the security level of the system.