Abstract
We present the architecture of a middleware platform, called Collaborative Middleware for Monitoring Financial Critical Infrastructure (CoMiFin), that facilitates collaborative protection of the financial critical infrastructure (CI). At the core of CoMiFin is a new abstraction of Semantic Room (SR), allowing the interested participants to share information and combine their computing powers to collectively resist massive scale attacks against their IT and business assets. We describe a full stack of software components aiming at realizing SR in a distributed setting. At the lowest level, the SR functionality relies on a customizable event processing platform, which can be supported through a variety of event processing and analytics containers. The containers abstract away the intricacies of the distributed environment, and allow the application developers to focus on implementing the processing logic at hand. The higher level aspects of the SR abstraction are supported by the SR Management layer, which includes components to control the SR lifecycle and deployment, inter-SR connectivity, and the contract compliance monitoring. The proposed architecture is modular and flexible, allowing the developers to easily create and customize the processing logic according to the SR business goals, plug in different types of processing platforms, and deploy the implementation in a variety of realistic settings.