Providing Security SLA in Next Generation Data Centers with SPECS:
The EMC Case Study
Valentina Casola
1
, Massimiliano Rak
2
, Silvio La Porta
3
and Andrew Byrne
3
1
Universit
`
a “Federico II” di Napoli, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e Tecnologie dell’Informazione, Napoli, Italy
2
Seconda Universit
`
a di Napoli, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Aversa, Italy
3
EMC Ireland COE Innovation, Cork, Ireland
Keywords:
Cloud, ngDC, Cloud Security, Security SLA.
Abstract:
Next generation Data Centers (ngDC) are the cloud-based architectures devoted to offering infrastructure
services in flexible ways: managing in an integrated way compute, network and storage services. This solution
is very attractive from an organisation’s perspective but one of the main challenges to adoption is the perception
of loss of security and control over resources that are dynamically acquired in the cloud and that reside on
remote providers. For a full adoption, datacenter customers need more guarantees about the security levels
provided, creating the need for tools to dynamically negotiate and monitor the security requirements. The
SPECS project proposes a platform that offers security features with an as-a-service approach, furthermore it
uses Security Service Level Agreements (Security SLA) as a means for establishing a clear statement between
customers and providers to define a mutual agreement. This paper presents an industrial experience from
EMC that integrates the SPECS Platform and their innovative solutions for ngDC. In particular, the paper will
illustrate how it is possible to negotiate, enforce and monitor a Security SLA in a cloud infrastructure offering.
1 INTRODUCTION
Storage services, like many IT services, are in-
creasingly moving toward the virtualized, distributed
cloud model. Indeed, recent concepts like ngDC or
Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) (Davidson,
2013) are grounded in the ideas of virtualization, of-
fering the capability to run multiple independent vir-
tual servers using a set of shared, physical resources.
Resource Pooling is another significant advantage of
the ngDC and SDDC solutions, enabling the auto-
matic allocation of storage, network and compute re-
sources to meet the demand of incoming requests.
This is one of the foundational concepts cloud com-
puting is built on. In fact, through ngDC provisioning
models, a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) may offer
on demand, scalable, secure and cost effective cloud
infrastructures or services upon which Cloud Service
Customers (CSC) can develop their own services.
However, one of the key limiting factors holding
back larger adoption of the cloud services is trust. In
cloud computing the tangible assets of the CSC be-
come intangible, virtual resources, that are dynami-
cally acquired via a 3
rd
Party provider. With these
provisioning models, the loss of control over their
own services and assets (data), CSCs are naturally
hesitant to place critical business applications or sen-
sitive data in the cloud. A possible solution to this
challenge could be the adoption of SLAs, clearly stat-
ing what services are provided by the CSP and the
related responsibilities in case of violation.
Despite the intense research efforts into develop-
ing standards and frameworks for SLAs (Theilmann
et al., 2008), (Morin, 2011),(EC, 2011), (CSCC,
2012), (International Organization for Standardiza-
tion, 2014), at the state of the art few solutions al-
low CSPs to offer practical, implementable Security
SLAs. Moreover, there are very few services able to
concretely monitor the security features which would
enable CSCs to verify the status of guaranteed SLAs.
In such a context, the SPECS project
1
proposes
a framework which aims to facilitate the automated
negotiation, monitoring and enforcement of Security
SLAs. This paper illustrates how the SPECS frame-
work is used in order to enhance a ngDC storage ser-
vice with security features based on customer’s re-
quirements. In particular, we integrate SPECS with
1
http://www.specs-project.eu/
138
Casola, V., Rak, M., Porta, S. and Byrne, A.
Providing Security SLA in Next Generation Data Centers with SPECS: The EMC Case Study.
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2016) - Volume 2, pages 138-145
ISBN: 978-989-758-182-3
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
the ViPR storage controller
2
, a commercial product
offered as a service by EMC, in order to fully imple-
ment the ngDC paradigm by offering storage services
protected by Security SLAs.
The implementation of security capabilities, en-
forced and monitored through SPECS demonstrates
the effectiveness of Security SLAs as a concrete so-
lution that can be adopted in commercial products.
The effectiveness and adaptability of this approach is
further strengthened by use of standardized security
metrics to identify capabilities delivered by SPECS to
support the storage service. The outcome of this pro-
cess is to improve trust in the capabilities of the CSP
to protect and guarantee their assets services in the
cloud.
The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-
lows: Section 2 introduces the SPECS framework for
the provisioning of cloud services guaranteed by Se-
curity SLAs. Section 3 describes the main features
and limitations of ngDC that motivate the need for
more flexible and secure Data Centers. Section 4 in-
troduces our proposal of enhancing the ngDC with
Security SLAs based on the adoption of SPECS. In
particular, this section focuses on EMC storage so-
lutions. Section 5 describes the architecture of the
ngDC storage testbed and the enhanced security fea-
tures. Finally, Section 6 gives an overview of related
work on frameworks and guidelines for SLAs, while
Section 7 summarizes the conclusions and provides
direction for future work.
2 THE SPECS FRAMEWORK
The SPECS framework provides services and tools to
build applications offering services with security fea-
tures defined in, and granted by a Security SLA (Ca-
sola et al., 2014),(Rak et al., 2013).
The framework addresses both CSPs’ and users’
needs by providing tools for 1) enabling user-centric
negotiation of security parameters in a Security SLA;
2) providing a trade-off evaluation process among
CSPs; 3) real time monitoring of the fulfilment of
SLAs agreed with CSPs; 4) notifying both End-users
and CSPs in the event that an SLA is violated; 5) en-
forcing agreed SLAs in order to maintain the agreed
security levels. The SPECS framework is also able
to ”react and adapt” in real-time to fluctuations in the
security level by applying the required countermea-
sures.
In order to provide security capabilities granted by
Security SLAs, a SPECS Application orchestrates the
2
http://www.emc.com/vipr
so called SPECS Core Services dedicated to the Ne-
gotiation, Enforcement and Monitoring of an SLA.
Through these core services, the cloud service is en-
hanced with security capabilities guaranteed by the
signed SLA
In SPECS, four primary actors have been defined:
End-user: The CSC of a Cloud service;
SPECS Owner: The Cloud service provider;
External CSP: An independent (typically public)
CSP, unaware of the SLA, providing only basic
resources without security guarantees;
Developer: Supports the SPECS Owner in the de-
velopment of SPECS applications.
Figure 1: SPECS Entity Relationships.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the interactions among
the parties are very simple: the End-user uses the
Cloud services offered by the SPECS Owner, which
acquires resources from External CSPs, enriched with
capabilities to meet the End-user’s security require-
ments. SPECS then monitors and enforces the End-
user’s security requirements to ensure the agreed se-
curity levels and alert the End-user of any breaches in
the terms of the Security SLA.
3 NEXT GENERATION DATA
CENTER STORAGE
The ngDC is a highly efficient and optimized data
center that allows organisations to achieve more
within the confines of the available resources (phys-
ical servers, power, cooling, facilities, etc.). The key
advantage of the ngDC is its agility and ability to
adapt rapidly to changes in an organizations business
and workload requirements.
This efficiency is achieved in a ngDC by consoli-
dating the physical resources, in other words virtual-
izing it. As illustrated in Figure 2, we view the clas-
sical data center model as one in which there are ded-
icated physical resources for each application. The
Providing Security SLA in Next Generation Data Centers with SPECS: The EMC Case Study
139
Figure 2: Evolution of the data center towards a fully Virtualized environment.
first step in evolving towards the ngDC is to move
away from dedicated resources to consolidated re-
sources virtualizing the physical compute resources
though the use of Hypervisor technologies.
The second evolutionary step consists of virtualiz-
ing the network resources, dividing them into discrete
segments to isolate and segregate the traffic and/or the
service by creating virtual networking components
(e.g. virtual LANs, virtual SANs, virtual switches,
etc.) that are part of a Hypervisor, logical links, and
even converged networks.
The final phase before achieving a completely vir-
tualized data center is to abstract out the physical stor-
age resources. In the classic storage model, an Intel-
ligent Storage System is used to group disks together
and then partition those physical disks into discrete
logical disks. These logical disks are assigned a Log-
ical Unit Number (LUN), and are presented to a host,
or hosts, as a physical device. Redundancy of the data
stored on the disks is provided by RAID (Redundant
Array of Independent Disks) technology, which is ap-
plied at either the physical disk layer or the logical
disk layer.
This classic model has several limitations how-
ever. For example, there is an upper limit to the max-
imum number of physical disks that can be combined
to form a logical disk. Another issue is that often the
amount of storage provisioned for each application is
greater than what is actually needed in order to pre-
vent application downtime. Both of these situations
results in inefficient usage of the physical storage re-
sources that needlessly remain idle.
These kinds of inefficiencies can be resolved by
introducing Software Defined Storage (SDS) appli-
cations such as EMC’s ViPR in order to virtualize
the tiered storage resources. The outcome is a more
efficient usage of resources which result in reduced
power and space costs in the data center as well as
reduced workloads for storage and server administra-
tors. The power of these SDS solutions is the abstrac-
tion of the physical resources by creating resource
pools designed to support more generalized work-
loads across applications. This enables the capacity
usage and requirements to be more closely monitored
and aligned to the available resources - further reduc-
ing the operational costs.
But what about software-defined security? Most
(or all) of the security controls can be automated and
managed through software, depending on how vir-
tualized the infrastructure is. Such an approach re-
quires any service to be controlled under some secu-
rity policy. The innovative idea proposed in SPECS
to enhance the ngDC, is to provide Security-as-a-
Service (SecaaS) according to agreed Security SLA.
To achieve this, in following sections, the integration
of the ngDC with the SPECS framework is proposed
such that the full Security SLA life cycle can be man-
aged.
4 INTEGRATING SPECS WITH
ngDC
In a ngDC, the infrastructure is virtualised, delivered
as a service and controlled by management applica-
tions. This shift in the architectural approach for the
data center offers a more agile, flexible and scalable
model. The core idea is the decoupling of the hard-
ware from the software layer. Indeed, services (OSs,
applications and workloads) view these abstracted,
virtual resources as though they were physical com-
pute, storage and network resources. Figure 3 il-
lustrates the relationships between the infrastructure
layer, including different physical resources, and the
service and application layers.
Despite the multitude of benefits available when
leveraging a Cloud infrastructure, wide scale Cloud
adoption for sensitive or critical business applications
CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science
140
Figure 3: Next Generation Data Center Architecture.
still faces resistance due to concerns over the pri-
vacy and security of the data, workloads and appli-
cations outsourced to the Cloud provider’s data cen-
ters. Cloud providers typically offer a set of security
measures advertised to potential customers, however
without the ability to provide assurance of those se-
curity measures or to maintain visibility over the ser-
vice, the Cloud customer has no way to verify the ser-
vice is being provided as described.
Integrating SPECS with the ngDC offers a Se-
caaS solution, not only by establishing a process to
negotiate and monitor services running in the data
center, but also building on the native security fea-
tures present by providing additional security features
delivered through virtual machines dynamically allo-
cated and instantiated on the data center to meet the
security requirements. Combined with the guarantees
provided through a Security SLA, these security fea-
tures improve the confidence with which end users
can migrate their applications and data to the Cloud.
Figure 4 illustrates where the SPECS platform in-
tegrates with a typical ngDC architecture. In EMC’s
use case, ViPR is used to offer software defined stor-
age management for the ngDC storage resources.
Figure 4: SPECS Enhanced Data Center Architecture.
4.1 Providing ngDC using SPECS Core
Services
In Figure 5 the usage of SPECS to provide ngDC
services is illustrated: the SPECS platform is used
to negotiate an SLA for storage resources provided
by ViPR. On receipt of the SPECS negotiated offer,
the End-user can sign the SLA which will trigger the
Enforcement phase of SPECS, making the newly ac-
quired resources available to the End-user. In parallel
to this, the Monitoring module is configured so that
the resources are continuously monitored. The three
phases are described in detail in the following subsec-
tions.
Figure 5: SPECS Service Negotiation/Brokering Service.
4.1.1 Negotiation
Formatted according to the SPECS Security SLA for-
mat (De Benedictis et al., 2015), security features are
represented using few simple concepts: Security ca-
pabilities, the set of security controls (NIST, 2013)
that a security mechanism is able to enforce on the
target service; Security metrics, the standard of mea-
surement adopted to evaluate security levels of the
services offered; Security Level Objectives (SLOs),
the conditions, expressed over security metrics, rep-
resenting the security levels that must be respected
according to the SLA.
Security-related SLOs are negotiated based on the
SPECS Customer’s requirements. A set of compli-
ant offers, each representing a different supply chain
to implement, is identified and validated. The agreed
terms are included in a Security SLA that is signed by
the SPECS Customer and the SPECS Owner.
4.1.2 Enforcement
Once the SLA has been successfully negotiated, it
is implemented through the Enforcement services,
which acquire resources from External CSPs and ac-
tivate the appropriate components (that implement se-
curity capabilities). This approach provides security
capabilities as-a-Service to fulfil the SLOs included
in the signed Security SLA.
Each identified security capability is implemented
by an appropriate security mechanism able to cover a
set of pre-defined security controls. In SPECS, a se-
curity mechanism is a piece of software dedicated to
implementing security features on the target service.
The information associated with a security mecha-
nism is included in the mechanism’s metadata, pre-
pared by the mechanism’s developer and includes all
information needed to automate the security mecha-
nism’s deployment, configuration and monitoring.
Cloud-automation tools, such as Chef
3
, can be
used to automatically implemented the security capa-
bilities required in the SLA through the Enforcement
services.
3
https://www.chef.io/chef/
Providing Security SLA in Next Generation Data Centers with SPECS: The EMC Case Study
141
4.1.3 Monitoring
In the Enforcement phase, the appropriate monitor-
ing components are also configured and activated.
The activation of monitoring components includes the
launching of services and agents that are able to mon-
itor the specific parameters included in the Security
SLA. These services and agents, which may be repre-
sented by existing monitoring tools integrated within
the framework, generate data that is collected and
processed by the SPECS Monitoring module (Casola
et al., 2015).
Under specific conditions, the Monitoring module
generates monitoring events, which are further pro-
cessed to verify whether they reveal a violation of the
SLA or indicate a possible incoming violation. As a
consequence, if a violation occurs, corrective counter-
measures may be adopted consisting of reconfiguring
the service being delivered, taking the appropriate re-
mediation actions, or notifying the the End-User and
renegotiating/terminating the SLA.
5 THE SPECS ENHANCED ngDC
STORAGE TESTBED
A core objective of the SPECS framework is to de-
ploy cloud services with user defined security capa-
bilities guaranteed by a Security SLA. SPECS allows
the End-user to express the desired capabilities in the
Security SLA using a reference standard for guid-
ance and clarity (e.g. Cloud Control Matrix (CCM)
3.0(CSA, 2015) and NIST SP 800-53 (NIST, 2013)).
This section describes the testbed used to integrate
SPECS and ViPR, the ViPR usage model and the ad-
ditional security features delivered as-a-Service and
guaranteed by a Security SLA.
5.1 Physical and Software Testbed
The core components of the architecture, illustrated in
Figure 6, are: (i) ESXi server; (ii) Cisco Switch; (iii)
VMAX array; (iv) Management Server.
The management server, running Windows Server
2008 R2 (W2K08), is used to set up and manage the
network to which the VMAX array is connected. Ad-
ditionally, EMCs SMI-S provider
4
must be installed
on this system in order to enable the management of
VMAX via ViPR. The VMAX array itself consists of
the VMAX controller and two VMAX bays equipped
with 800 disks for a total available storage space of
4
https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-19629
200TB. ESXi
5
is VMware’s bare-metal hypervi-
sor that virtualizes servers and is installed directly on
top of the physical server, partitioning resources into
multiple virtual machines. These core components
are connected via high speed fiber channel managed
by a Cisco switch.
Figure 6: Physical Architecture.
In addition to these core components, the follow-
ing technologies are also used to support the test en-
vironment:
VCenter Server: Provides a centralized and exten-
sible platform for managing virtual infrastructure.
EMC ViPR Controller: Storage automation soft-
ware
Chef: Powerful automation platform that is able
to automate the configuration, deployment, and
management of VMs across different networks.
Figure 7 illustrates the high level configuration of
the Chef Server alongside the SPECS core provider.
In this configuration, Chef is used to install and con-
figure applications, and to deploy VMs. Services se-
lected from the list of available Chef cookbooks via
SPECS are deployed from the Chef Server as a Chef
recipe, launching a VM preconfigured to execute the
security service.
Figure 7: Software Architecture.
As can also be seen in Figure 7, the ViPR con-
troller is run as a virtual appliance (vApp) on the
5
https://www.vmware.com/products/
vsphere-hypervisor
CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science
142
ESXi server with the VMAX storage in the back-end
supplying the physical resources. The ViPR vApp is
deployed using the 3+2 configuration file for redun-
dancy purposes (available from EMC support
6
). In
this deployment configuration, five virtual machines
are used to run the vApp, with two VMs able to fail
without affecting the availability of the vApp.
5.2 ViPR Storage Service
The ViPR controller, accessible as a web application
running as a vApp on an ESXi server, offers End-
users virtual pools of storage resources using the as-
a-Service model. Using the ViPR REST API to ex-
ecute commands, the SPECS framework can access
all the functionality available through the controller.
Furthermore, this enables SPECS to allocate storage
services with additional security controls that can be
negotiated, for example Business Continuity Manage-
ment and Operational Resilience (BCR-01, BCR-09
and BCR-11 in the CCM control framework).
While it is possible for the End-user to set up secu-
rity features for the storage directly via ViPR, this re-
quires significant technical and security expertise and
should be restricted to IT or Security administrators.
In contrast to this, the SPECS negotiation interface is
intuitive to personnel without specific administration
expertise, enabling them to select security require-
ments. Furthermore, the End-user can monitor the
enforcement of the security metrics over which the
SLOs have been defined.
For the evaluation and testing of the SPECS
framework, the security control baselines defined in
NIST SP 800-53 were selected to provide a standard-
ised mapping to the security mechanisms offered by
SPECS. This paper presents different security con-
trols across categories such as Access Control, Iden-
tification and Authentication, Physical and Environ-
mental Protection, and System and Information In-
tegrity.
Table 1 shows some of the possible mappings used
between the NIST security controls and the security
features for Cloud storage services, expressed through
security metrics and their description.
On selecting the EMC ngDC SPECS application
from the SPECS portal, the End-user can choose from
different service configuration parameters categorised
into the following Security Capabilities:
Secure Storage Capabilities: Security capabili-
ties added to support services offered by storage
providers.
6
https://support.emc.com/downloads/32034 ViPR
Table 1: Sample mappings between NIST Security Controls
and SPECS Security Features.
Metric Description NIST
mapping
RAID
Level(s)
Defines the RAID level
the volumes in the vir-
tual pool will consist of.
SA-2, SC-
6, CP-9,
CP-10,
SI-17
SAN
Multi-
Path
The number of paths that
can be used between a
host and a storage vol-
ume.
SC-6, SI-
17
Data
Geoloca-
tion
Defines in which data
center the virtual stor-
age and its copies are lo-
cated.
PE-17,
PE-18,
PE-20,
SI-12
Max
Mirrors
Defines the Maximum
number of data storage
mirrors.
SC-5, SC-
6, SI-13
Availability Capabilities: Capabilities providing
redundancy and business continuity in the event
of security incidents involving the storage service.
Each type of capability is responsible for a spe-
cific security aspect and is associated with a group of
security controls. For example, the Availability Ca-
pabilities are associated with SC-6 (Resource Avail-
ability) and SI-17 (Fail-Safe Procedures) as defined
in NIST SP 800-53 for Security and Privacy Controls
(FORCE and INITIATIVE, 2013).
On selecting the type of capabilities required for
the storage service, the End-user is then presented
with the available capabilities under the selected cate-
gories. For example, the Availability Capabilities cat-
egory includes capabilities such as RAID level, High
Availability, Maximum Snapshots, etc.
Once the End-user has specified their require-
ments, the SPECS portal will display an overview of
the capabilities requested for the storage service, as
shown in Figure 8. This form displays the metric,
the associated value and the importance weight asso-
ciated with each.
Once the Agreement has been submitted and
signed, the Implementation function (of the Enforce-
ment module) implements the signed SLA by making
a series of requests via the ViPR REST API to set up
the storage service according to the requested capa-
bilities and security mechanisms. Furthermore, dur-
ing the implementation phase, the ViPR monitoring
agents are configured according to the metrics speci-
fied in the SLA. The SPECS Monitoring module can
then make requests via ViPR’s REST API to contin-
uously check the status of the allocated storage and
verify if any SLA violation occurs.
Providing Security SLA in Next Generation Data Centers with SPECS: The EMC Case Study
143
Figure 8: SLA negotiated through SPECS.
Once the enforcement process is successfully
completed, the resources are available through the
ViPR administration interface. The capabilities re-
quested through SPECS are reflected in the provi-
sioned storage.
6 RELATED WORK
The drive towards the adoption of SLAs by CSPs is an
important initiative in strengthening the trust in ser-
vices. SLA management frameworks like SLA@SOI
(Theilmann et al., 2008) associate services with an
SLA, detect SLA violations and are even able to re-
cover from them. Many research projects, like Con-
trail (Morin, 2011), Optimis
7
and mOSAIC include
SLAs in their framework.
ENISA ((Dekker, 2012)(Catteddu,
2011)(Marnix Dekker, 2011)) outlined the need
for a Security SLA that offers clear guarantees with
respect to the security provided by CSPs to services.
Projects like CUMULUS (Pannetrat et al., 2013),
A4Cloud (Pearson, 2011), SPECS (Rak et al., 2013),
SLAReady
8
, SLALOM
9
, MUSA (Rios et al., 2015)
are actively working on this topic, attempting to
clearly model and represent security into an SLA.
Security and compliance issues in the ngDC are a
primary concern due to the reliance on traditional se-
curity models that have not adapted to virtualization.
In the ngDC, and cloud computing as a whole, new,
significant risks have been introduced to IT services.
Organisations who traditionally hosted workloads and
data in internal data centres running on their own in-
frastructure, now face a loss of visibility and control.
The trust boundaries that were clearly established in
physical infrastructures are now blurred as virtualized
7
http://www.optimis-project.eu/
8
http://www.sla-ready.eu/
9
http://slalom-project.eu/
resources are increasingly used.
These new security issues have spawned several
research activities into novel solutions to address the
security of data in the cloud. For example, Nithi-
avathy proposes a framework to check the data in-
tegrity on CSP using homomorphic token and dis-
tributed erasure-coded data (Nithiavathy, 2013). Al-
ternatively, a secure multi-owner data sharing scheme
for cloud users using group signature and broadcast
encryption was proposed in (Marimuthu et al., 2014).
Other works focus on the security of the com-
munication between distributed Data Centers such as
(Talpur et al., 2015), that proposed a security frame-
work to manage a large number of secure connections
implemented using Kinetic
10
and Pyretic
11
as a cen-
tralized middleware tool. Each of these solutions ad-
dress a part of the problem, but do not offer a platform
on which the CSC can combine security requirements
that can be addressed in different application layers,
or give formal assurance to End-user through SLAs.
7 CONCLUSIONS
Next generation Data Centers provide a significant
evolution how resources, such as storage, network and
compute, can be dynamically provisioned. The ngDC
offers the possibility to virtualize resources and dy-
namically pool them according to customer needs in
an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provisioning model.
To achieve broader adoption, datacenter cus-
tomers need more guarantees about the security lev-
els provided, creating the need for tools to negotiate
security requirements and to be able to monitor their
enforcement. This paper has investigated the poten-
tial of integrating the SPECS platform with the com-
mercially available ViPR storage solution from EMC.
This integration was shown to offer security as-a-
service, enhancing the security provided by the ViPR,
and guaranteed by a Security SLA.
In particular, this paper has illustrated, with a real
case study, how it is possible to negotiate, enforce and
monitor a Security SLA in a ngDC architecture. Po-
tential future directions from this work should focus
on the definition of new security metrics that can be
easily measured and monitored in order to provide
new security capabilities to a storage infrastructure
and enable a CSP to enrich its security service offer-
ings.
10
http://resonance.noise.gatech.edu/
11
http://frenetic-lang.org/pyretic/
CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science
144
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research is partially supported by the EC FP7
project SPECS (Grant Agreement no. 610795).
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