Inventors from Qatar University: Dr Armstrong Nhlabatsi, Eng. Rachael Fernandez, Eng. Alaa Hussein, Dr. Noora Fetais, and Dr Khaled Khan received a new patent titled: “Threat-Specific Security Risk Evaluation for Networked Systems”.

 Existing security risk evaluation approaches do not consider specific security requirements of individual organizations in the security risk evaluation.  This patent has defined a threat-specific risk evaluation approach that uses various security attributes of the cloud as well as the organization-specific security requirements. The patented approach allows a security administrator of the cloud provider to make fine-grained decisions for selecting mitigation strategies in order to protect the outsourced computing assets of individual organizations based on their specific security needs against specific threats.  On the other hand, the proposed approach enables security administrators to compute a range of more effective organization-specific countermeasures with respect to the importance of security requirements and threats. The experimental evaluation results demonstrate that effective security solutions vary due to specific threats prioritized by different organizations for an application in the cloud. Further, the proposed approach is not limited to only the cloud-based systems, but can easily be adopted to other networked systems. We have also developed a software tool to support the proposed approach. This patented approach is an improved technique for monitoring the security of network. The team hopes this invention will make evaluation of network security risk more effective and robust. 

Congratulations to the patent team!