Acceleration at the Edge for Supporting SMEs Security: The FORTIKA Paradigm
Evangelos Markakis, Yannis Nikoloudakis, George N. Mastorakis, Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis, Evangelos Pallis, Anargyros Sideris, Νικόλαος Ζώτος, Jan Antić, Aleš Černivec, Diana Fejzic, Joze Kulovic, Antonio J. Jara, Anastasios Drosou, Konstantinos M. Giannoutakis, Dimitrios K. Tzovaras · IEEE Communications Magazine · 2019
This article presents FORTIKA, an ongoing EU-funded project which is a resilient cyber-security solution that can easily be tailored and adjusted to the versatile and ever changing needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To fulfill its vision, FORTIKA adopts a security-by-design hybrid approach that adequately integrates hardware and software with business needs and behavioral patterns at the individual and organizational levels to introduce an FPGA-powered middleware security layer as an add-on to existing network gateways, orientating small business users to trusted cyber-security services (through FORTIKA's marketplace) packaged in tailored solutions for each enterprise, and further extended to accommodate security intelligence and encourage security-friendly behavioral and organizational changes. Finally, the introduction of a software-defined smart ecosystem in the FORTIKA marketplace provides the feature of a lightweight solution, which offers virtualized security services (with minimum downloading requirements). Users (i.e., SMEs) may utilize a variety of services and share profiling information with the service providers in return for tailored security services aligned with their actual needs. FORTIKA marketplace also functions as a single point of access for the profiling information for each SME. Preliminary evaluation results indicate that users can upload bundles to the marketplace repository in approximately 4 to 5 minutes, download bundles from the FORTIKA marketplace to the gateway in approximately 20 seconds, and deploy them in an average of 4.5 ms.