Fifth GLACIER consortium meeting took place as video conference

Due to COVID-19 pandemic the fifth GLACIER consortium meeting took place with delay and via video conference on September 23rd, 2020. The project partners had already shifted from phone to video conferencing technology for their meetings every other week so that they did not need further technical preparation. Even though personal contact would have been more efficient the project team did not want to take any health risk. Via video conference project planning, work status, and work packages were successfully discussed.

Open source solution Jitsi meet (www.jitsi.org) was used as video conference tool (see figure). Since March 2020 DECOIT^® hosts and uses Jitsi Meet for partner and customer meetings. In contrast to other solutions Jitsi Meet can be installed on one's own server (On-Premises), it allows end-to-end encrypted connections and offers features such as desktop sharing and chat between participants. Due to the use of own servers it is compliant with data privacy because it is not necessary to rely on a cloud application which is hosted outside Germany. Therefore, Jitsi Meet is a better alternative than Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex. Furthermore, there is no need to install any software on the devises - only a chrome or firefox browser needs to be available. The GLACIER project partners have come to value this communication possibility.

A few tasks have not been completed yet. Two internal work package (WP) reports of WP 1 are still due. Software development itself makes good progress but the technical documentation lags behind. There was no delay caused by the COVID19 pandemic because the digitization level of the project cooperation is high. In general, the project is still on schedule. The project partners published project results in different ways. GLACIER was presented at the virtual international conference IDAACS-SWS in Dortmund in the forms of poster und keynote session. Further conference and fair participation fell victim to the COVID19 pandemic. However, professional publications were carried out via various publishers.

With regards to software development the user interface SIEM-GUI by DECOIT^® has been reviewed, especially the visualization of anomalies was discussed. That is because data preparation for the back-end still represents a challenge. The cubes approach for anomaly detection by the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover has been reviewed as well. It still needs a large part of research but the first implementation is planned for this year. That way, first tests at the project's associated partners could be carried out at the beginning of next year. At the same time rt-solutions GmbH and DECOIT^® GmbH plan to include elastic SIEM and evaluate if its anomaly detection works similar to GLACIER's own development. REST-API was successfully unified. rt-solutions GmbH and DECOIT^® GmbH continue to work on the component controller and the component manager.

The virtual consortium meeting was a great success and will take place in the same way next time. Once project partners will be able to meet face-2-face again this technique will additionally be used in order to include project partners who for some reason cannot be there in person.