Large
and distributed computer infrastructures face important cyber-security
challenges. They are high value targets for attack due the big amount of
computational power, storage capacity and network resources. These
systems require novel computer security approaches, that employ emerging
technologies such as data mining, machine learning, autonomous
reasoning systems, automatic security hardening among others. Those
technologies can be employed in areas such as distributed intrusion
detection, automatic vulnerability discovery, automatic vulnerability
patching, and in general all the areas that allow the system
administration to have a clear security panorama over the entire
computational infrastructure.
The CBM experiment at FAIR consists of a number of different detectors
which require the readout of multiple detector frontend electronics.
This is usually done with special FPGA based read-out controller (ROC)
boards. The different detectors assemble different frontend electronics
requiring different ROCs or at least different ROC firmwares. However,
the interface in the other direction of the readout chain - towards the
computing nodes - is usually quite the same for all the readout logics
of the different detectors.
A Detector Control System (DCS) gets into focus whenever a large number of various sensors and actors within a detector need to be monitored, operated or synchronized in a well specified manner by using a centralized approach. In case of particle accelerator detectors, some well established systems in this context are for example SCADA or EPICS. These control systems make it possible to connect all supervised components of a detector to a special controls network which ensures, that even in an emergency situation all devices can be reached and at least put into a safety mode that prevents human injuries or device damage.