=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3637/paper12
|storemode=property
|title=An Ontological Approach to Compliance Verification of the NIS 2
Directive
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3637/paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-3637
|authors=Giampaolo Bella,Gianpietro Castiglione,Daniele Francesco Santamaria
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/BellaCS23
}}
==An Ontological Approach to Compliance Verification of the NIS 2
Directive==
An Ontological Approach to Compliance Verification
of the NIS 2 Directive
Giampaolo Bella1 , Gianpietro Castiglione1 and Daniele Francesco Santamaria1
1 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Viale Andrea Doria 6 - 95125 - Catania,
Italy
Abstract
Cybersecurity, which notoriously concerns both human and technological aspects, is becoming more
and more regulated by a number of textual documents spanning several pages, such as the European
GDPR Regulation and the NIS Directive. This paper introduces an approach that leverages techniques of
semantic representation and reasoning, hence an ontological approach, towards the compliance check with
the security measures that textual documents prescribe. We choose the ontology instrument to achieve
two fundamental objectives: domain modelling and resource interrogation. The formalisation of entities
and relations from the directive, and the consequent improved structuring with respect to sheer prose is
dramatically helpful for any organisation through the hard task of compliance verification. The semantic
approach is demonstrated with two articles of the new European NIS 2 directive.
Keywords
Ontology, Security Directive, Compliance
1. Introduction
The increasingly rapid growth and complexity of security issues concerns both private and public
organisations. It could be argued that the broad scope of security measures is demonstrated by
recent security directives, and a remarkable example of this is European. In 2016, the European
Parliament approved the first regulation on security, named the NIS directive, whose recipients are
the nations belonging to the European jurisdiction. The directive is a document written without
technicalities in natural language containing measures to which the member states must comply.
In the last months of 2022, an updated version called NIS 2 totalling 73 pages [1] replaced the
former in light of the new challenges. In front of this and similar documents of similar size and
complexity, this paper faces the overarching problem of how to simplify their reading and make
it actionable towards compliance verification. This is challenging for a variety of reasons due to
informal, incomplete and ambiguous prose on one hand, and to linguistic complexity on the other.
For example, Alotaibi et al. review such challenges [2] and OWASP names “Non-transparent
Policies, Terms and Conditions” [3] as a privacy risk. To practically address that problem, this
paper sets two research questions:
OSS2023: Ontologies for Services and Society, 9th Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2023), co–located with FOIS
2023, 19–20 July, 2023, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada
$ giampaolo.bella@unict.it (G. Bella); gianpietro.castiglione@phd.unict.it (G. Castiglione);
daniele.santamaria@unict.it (D. F. Santamaria)
https://www.dmi.unict.it/giamp/ (G. Bella); https://www.dmi.unict.it/santamaria/ (D. F. Santamaria)
© 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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RQ1: Can we mechanically interpret the relevant entities and relations from security
directives given as large documents?
Security directives and similar documents are complicated from a linguistic standpoint. If the
fundamental actors could be interpreted following a specific pattern, it would be easier to identify
their relations and consequently derive an understanding of the general picture as well as of
possible pitfalls.
RQ2: Can we mathematically prove that the relations interpreted from security
directives hold for specific actors?
An example relation is between member states and CSIRT (Computer Security Incident Response
Team) actors; each member state has the specific task to designate its own CSIRT. Therefore,
answering this research question for a specific member state would mean establishing whether
that state designated its own CSIRT.
Formal methods are among the most powerful tools for proving various properties, such as
the correctness of security protocols. They take a specific model of the target system and assert,
with mathematical support, if the model follows predetermined behaviours. One of the most
remarkable formal methods is the inductive one [4]. We argue that a similar, mathematically
rooted approach could strengthen the process of compliance verification with security measures,
and follow this argument by advancing a formalisation, which we call characterisation, of the
NIS 2 directive into the domain of ontologies. While the current version of the ontology is a
work-in-progress that only covers some excerpts from articles 7 and 10, its benefits in terms of
simplified consultation, interpretation and interrogation, thereby providing an answer to RQ1.
The ontology, supported by a prototypical implementation for demonstration purposes, allows
us to conduct a detailed analysis of the text to identify the semantic patterns of the structures and
of the sentences, following the ontology patterns defined by Gangemi et al [5]. We give particular
attention to the compliance aspect and appeal to logical derivation through inferences and then to
queries by description logic, thereby providing an answer to RQ2.
The ontology is released as open-source through a public repository [6]. It must be remarked
that its development is currently ongoing towards a more complete coverage of the NIS 2 directive.
However, its current version supports the case that semantic representation provides an effective
method for compliance verification.
The paper is organised in the following way. Section 2 illustrates the related work on the use of
ontologies in the fields of security and its regulations. Section 3 introduces the NIS 2 directive. In
Section 4, we present a high-level representation of the directive, which grounds our approach. In
Section 5, we specify how entities and relations are interpreted from the directive, while Section
6 shows how an ontology is built upon it, also taking into account the compliance aspect. Section
7 summarises our results and outlines the future perspectives.
2. Related work
The use of ontologies is particularly consolidated outside the security realm, and coherently to
our work, also in the legal and compliance context. For example, ontologies were utilised for
creating a shared conceptualisation for compliance management [7], [8]. However, as a powerful
relational tool, it is increasingly used for security purposes, for example, for modelling smart
contracts in blockchains [9].
Ontologies are useful for the classification of generic assets, both hardware and software, of
a system or to classify common knowledge, for example, public databases (CWE - Common
Weakness Enumeration, etc.) of vulnerabilities useful for penetration testing [10], [11].
Another example that deserves a mention is the knowledge base developed by MITRE [12] for
threat modelling and attack tactics.
As the reasoning mechanism is peculiar to ontological languages, its usage to track relations
and compliance is proven. The closest work of structuring security documents, with which we can
compare ours, was proposed by Fenz et al. [13] with a different target and method. Standards and
directives may appear similar in treatment since they both possess a specific structure that defines
the order of security measures but with different scopes. Whereas a security standard applies
in an industrial context, a security directive relates to political and institutional organisations.
This could result in different management of documents and, consequently, in their ontological
representation.
Different scope means different recipients which imply different needs. There are two more
strong points that allow us to differentiate them, namely, time and possibility. A security standard
might be adopted by an enterprise in an indefinite time at the discretion of the company. Potentially
no one could adopt it. Meanwhile, a security directive must be adopted by political institutions at
a definite time. Having a tool that speeds up the compliance verification of the directives could
be more impactful and in particular if the object has a continental range.
The same cited work superficially treats the method applied for sentence enucleation, focusing
more on the implementation part. This paper is focused on that, as we consider the topic
fundamental to propose an efficient mechanism for security measures representation.
3. Description of the NIS 2 directive
The NIS 2, Directive (EU) 2022/2555 [1], was adopted on 14 December 2022, and is effective
from 16 January 2023, replacing Directive (EU) 2016/1148. The directive sets rules for security
risk management across the nations of the European Union regarding the most important sectors.
In some cases, it aligns with related legislation and defines how nations have to cooperate through
the establishment of specific groups of relevant stakeholders. The member states will have to
adopt the new version of the directive within 21 months.
The ontological representation of the whole document requires demanding work. However, not
all sentences need to be translated into ontological language because they often do not express
anything that actors have to fulfil. It is possible to extract exactly the parts that are relevant for a
complete ontological representation, and we argue that such parts contain chapters from 2 through
7, including Article 6 of Chapter 1. We decided to exclude the early part of Chapter 1 because it
only makes general considerations on the applicability of the directive. The same goes for the
contents of Chapter 8.
4. Relational modelling of the NIS 2 directive
Our approach starts with a representation of the directive through a relational model. In fact,
one of the main issues when facing security directives is their complexity. For example, it is
not obvious that all measures concerning a specific entity are in the same place in the document
and, consequently, it is complicated to derive all relations pertaining to the entity. The articles
contained in a directive are distributed across the logical sectioning, which is not always obvious.
We interpreted the relevant entities and relations from the NIS 2 and build a relational model
whose nodes contain entities and whose arrows represent relations. The model, which is in
Figure 1, supports an ontological representation of the directive. For example, it may help the
analyst to envisage the role of institutional and private bodies and their interactions, resulting in
a valid guide to newbies for the next steps. It allows us to analyse the potential pitfalls and the
applicability of each relation. This is useful not only for security analysts but also for the possible
future redesigns of the directive.
External peers
Left
Cooperate with Review
Institutional and Designate Security frameworks Drive National risk
private bodies Reporting & and strategies assessment
Notifying
Comply
Adopt Persecute Perform Right Assess Manage
Cooperative and Measures, products,
Regulatory policies Security actions services and processes Incidents & Threats
individual tasks
Figure 1: Relational model of entities of the NIS 2 directive
At this first round, we interpreted entities and relations from the directive by simply reading it,
considering the parts of the directive specified in Section 3. The model, from left to right, follows
a specific logic, in fact, the specific position of the nodes suggests a first-level sub-modelling.
The model we are proposing, in its entirety, could be considered a Content Ontology Pattern
as defined by Gangemi et al. [5], providing a design solution for the same class of problems.
We appealed to the names of the seven chapters considered, which helped us make a high-level
distinction. The two sub-models that can be identified are the left-one and right-one, each of them
holding the following properties:
4.1. Left sub-model
We drew the left sub-model referring to articles from 7 to 19, from 26 to 28 and from 31 to
35, each of them defining the role of main bodies and their specific tasks. On the top, the
sub-model has firstly the node ‘Institutional and private bodies’. In that node, we include all
human-composed bodies such as Member States, CSIRT, Eu-Cyclone, which play a primary role
in the directive and their eventual composition in groups (articles 7, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16). The
self-referential connection, namely cooperate with, makes explicit the concept of cooperation
(articles 13, 14, 17).
The bodies involved in the ‘Institutional and private bodies’ node have different types of tasks:
to designate security strategies and to follow assigned and predetermined tasks whose correctness
is imposed by specific policies. Each task and policy is defined in the article identifying the
related body or in separate articles; this happens, for example, with articles 8 and 9, which refer
to a yet-identified body, such as a Member State. Under the definition of tasks, we consider both
predetermined and event-driven ones. The actors, so the various organisations, persecute the
tasks considered as routine; for example, Article 18 concerns the biennial report of cybersecurity
activities. Moreover, we consider the security actions and choose the perform relation because
this class of tasks has to be performed as a response to events. The same goes for policies: we
define as a policy a specific modus operandi to which the bodies must be compliant; therefore,
bodies may adopt a policy.
Inside the definition of tasks, we also considered the measures proposed in chapters 7 and 8
(covering articles from 31 to 35) which regard general supervision of entities and jurisdiction
aspects.
We emphasise the role of ‘External reviewers’ node, which have the task to review the security
strategies, after their formalisation. The same idea of disaggregation used previously over tasks is
applied here to separate ‘External peers’, whose role is defined in Article 19, from ‘Institutional
and private bodies’. This is sound because ‘External peers’ could be part of external bodies
belonging to different organisations.
We can recursively repeat the previous considerations regarding tasks, but with a subject that is
made of multiple entities. For example, if we referred to a single CSIRT to perform a task, we
can surely agree that the task will also be pursued by the CSIRTs network.
It is important to underline that sub-model traversal may not be total. It means that not
all entities included in the ‘institutional and private bodies’ node have to fulfil the relational
connections. For example, not all of them have to perform security tasks. The main reason for
this more-general modelling is just for the sake of simplicity of representation of the relations.
4.2. Right sub-model
The right sub-model illustrates the compliance aspects and the role of security strategies, including
the activity of information sharing. We took articles from 20 to 25 and from 29 to 30. The
second sub-model is linked to the first sub-model via the designate relation. We prefer to
exclude the designation from the other tasks because of the node to which it refers. The node
representing ‘Security framework and strategies’ expresses all adopted measures, standards, and
certifications, which play a central role in a national context, hence it represents the central part
of the diagram. The ‘Security framework and strategies’ node encloses citizens, from both private
and public points of view, as well as political institutions, thereby acting as a connection point
from theoretical, or administrative, activities to practical ones (article 20). The role of this node is
to drive the activity of risk assessment to assess the relevant measures, products, services and
processes as well as to manage threats and incidents (articles 21 and 22).
The bodies considered in ‘Institutional and private bodies’ node must notify incidents and
threats in time and, possibly, reporting voluntarily information related to these incidents and
threats (articles 23, 29, 30).
In this sub-model, a node is dedicated to measures, products, services and processes, which
together represent the assets meant to be protected by design: they must comply with the standards
and certification schemes (articles 24 and 25) expressed by the security strategies promulgated by
the aforementioned bodies in the first sub-model. The assets that the node represents are grouped
together because this is the way they appear in the directive. If we wanted a possible separation
we would deduce at the end that the connections with the rest of the model would be the same,
for each asset. Therefore, to simplify the model, we can represent them with just one node.
5. Interpreting the NIS 2 directive
To build an ontological representation of the NIS 2 directive, we first establish how to interpret
the constitutional elements of the article and of the measures of the directive. We call this step
semantic interpretation since it aims to provide meaning to the words of the document towards the
ontological representation illustrated in the next Section. As previously remarked, the document
has some high-level characterising elements: entities and articles. The entities are the minimal
elements of the directive as they identify generic assets, both human and technological ones. To
establish a criterion to interpret them, we consider the articles as compositions of entities in the
form of sentences containing subject, predicate or verb, and object. Those three components
indicate who (the subject) must perform the specific security measure (the verb/predicate) towards
a specific target (the object). The following sub-sections show how we faced the interpretation of
those characterising elements.
5.1. Interpreting the NIS 2 entities
As a first step, we start with the interpretation of the entities. We can find a list of some of
them in Article 6. The entities are not hierarchically organised in such a way as to be useful for
ontological representation. For that, we need to establish interpretation criteria according to the
peculiarities of the entities. As a first criterion, we can clearly distinguish human-related from
technological-related ones. We also include entities that play a primary role in the directive. For
this reason, we establish a high-level entity named Actor. Article 6 does not enumerate all the
possible actors and, as a consequence, we need to build a sufficiently general model so as to
extend the class hierarchy when required. This step is done while structuring the single relevant
article. The entity Actor is a glaring example: a CSIRT is not present in the definitions of Article
6 but is clearly an Actor. The same applies to the Member State entity and, as we shall see, others.
Within the Actor entity, we can distinguish between human-centred and technological-centred
entities, which we respectively identify as Agent and System. The Agent entity includes the
possible human-centred entities involved in the security measures as well as those entities that
express actions, for example, the CSIRT. Agent also includes the possible human-centred actors
even though they play a passive role in some measures, for example, in the designation of a CSIRT
by a Member State. The reason is that the directive is, by nature, a best practice for someone who
must take action to comply. In this phase, we avoid to distinguish an Agent further according to
its passive and active role.
A different consideration is made for technological-centred entities. The choice of defining
role-less entities does not affect the generality of the model. A System could be passively used
by users and other entities such as a search engine or an online marketplace: they all need to be
protected, hence, they are the recipient of a security measure. At the same time, a system could be
an active tool. The NIS 2 does not explicitly refer to the tools used in cyber-kill chains during the
activities of vulnerability assessment and penetration testing but such activities are very useful to
prove the robustness of systems and organisations, the cornerstone of the NIS 2 itself. The same
idea is applicable to the entire infrastructure built for security testing. They could be generally
identified as System and specialised accordingly.
The approach can be straightforwardly applied to other entities. Some of them do not require
specific criteria of interpretation: we can identify them as general entities. Other security-related
objects can be ousted from the notion of Actor and treated accordingly.
5.2. Interpreting the NIS 2 actors and actions
In this Section, we show how to interpret actors and actions from an article, which is the second
characterising element of the directive.
The role of the articles is twofold: on the one hand to define rules that the subject has to follow
and, on the other hand, to further specialise entities. Each article refers at least to a specific agent
but complex articles may involve more agents.
For example, we take into account the following excerpt of Article 7: “Each Member State
shall adopt a national security strategy that provides for the strategic objectives, the resources
required to achieve those objectives, and appropriate policy and regulatory measures, with a
view to achieving and maintaining a high level of security. The national security strategy shall
include... As part of the national security strategy, Member States shall, in particular, adopt
policies:...”.
From the previous excerpt, we deduce that Member State is the main actor of the measures,
hence we consider it as an Agent. Once the Agent has been identified, we have to analyse the
sentences for identifying the relations since they make explicit the type of actions that the Agent
has to undertake. In the previous example, we already defined the subject, hence we choose
action Adopt as the main relation.
We focus on the following excerpt: “...the resources required to achieve those objectives, and
appropriate policy and regulatory measures, with a view to achieving and maintaining a high level
of security...”. As with many other excerpts, it adds nothing significant to our knowledge because
it expresses something that can be considered tautological. In fact, the target of ‘maintaining a
high level of security’ is intrinsic in adopting the Directive itself, hence we can decide to skip it.
We also avoid to consider words such as “Shall” since they only add redundancy.
By applying the interpretation process to subject (agent) and verb (relation), we can deconstruct
the sentences of each Article, thereby simplifying their interpretation.
5.3. Interpreting the NIS 2 objects and complex sentences
At this point, we interpreted that Member State Adopt but the object of the sentence is not yet
identified. In this section, we show how to identify the object of the sentences and how to deal
with complex sentences. Usually, in the directive, we can deduce that the scope of one single
verb is circumscribed to a sentence. Referring to the excerpt of Section 5.2, it is easy to identify
as the object of the predicate the phrase “national cybersecurity strategy”. The final interpreted
sentence results in Member State Adopt National Cybersecurity Strategy.
In case a security measure does not have to follow the standard structure consisting of subject,
predicate and object, two approaches can be adopted: a) splitting the sentence into short and
simple clauses, b) considering the part of the sentence following the object to qualify the
object itself. The first approach will produce two logical predicates: Member State Adopt
National Cybersecurity Strategy and National Cybersecurity Strategy include ..., whereas the
second approach will produce Member State Adopt National Cybersecurity Strategy and National
Cybersecurity Strategy has as qualifying entities Strategic Objectives and Regulatory Measures,
etc. Since those entities are too complex to be considered qualifying entities, we consider the first
approach more adequate. We do not consider the entity National Cybersecurity Strategy as an
Agent since it belongs to a different domain.
6. Designing an ontology for the NIS 2 directive
Given the considerations made so far, in this Section, we address the problem of representing
NIS 2 by proposing an initial ontology covering articles 7 and 10, termed NIS O NTOLOGY. We
adopted Protégé by Stanford University [14] as IDE for developing the ontology and to acquire
the supporting images shown in this paper. Article 7 was chosen because it is relevant in terms of
the definition of the Member State agent, while Article 10 provides relations among the agents
Member State and CSIRT.
6.1. Representation of entities and articles
We now focus on the semantic representation of articles and related entities through a new
ontology. A fragment of the hierarchies for entities and connections is depicted in Figure 4. Some
of the entities such as Agent are imported from the ontology Ontology for Agents, Systems, and
Integration of Services, (OASIS) [15, 16, 17], to favour its integration with NIS O NTOLOGY.
OASIS is meant to deliver a general representation system and a communication protocol for
agents and their interactions, therefore it is profitably leveraged here to inherit the advantages
of its behaviouristic approach. The behaviouristic approach is an abstraction of operational
semantics based on the definition of an agent’s behaviour through its decomposition in the
essential mental states of the agent, namely, goals and tasks that are sought to be accomplished.
Alongside the representation of the agent’s mental states, the behaviouristic approach takes care
of how behaviours are invoked and put into practice by agents. The idea of leveraging OASIS is
to include a representation mechanism where the behaviours of actors are conveyed. It is useful
for a meticulous and controlled placement of the specific actions of the NIS 2 actors because they
follow a specific flow: the predetermined verbs formally become tasks while the tasks concern
specific objects. This perfectly adheres to the definitions given above. For example, as an Agent,
a Member State has the task to notify the object National Cybersecurity Strategy, and so on.
In order to group all the articles, we create the class named NisArticles and develop the
hierarchy according to the level of specialisation. The articles are divided into sub-entities
corresponding to the agents by which they are addressed. For example, Article 10 will belong to
(a) NIS O NTOLOGY hierarchy for classes (b) NIS O NTOLOGY hierarchy for properties
Figure 2: A fragment of the NIS 2 Ontology hierarchy.
the hierarchy NisArticles → Article10 → {Article10-MemberState, Article10-CSIRT}, because
the agents involved in such articles are the MemberState and CSIRT ones, as the hierarchy in Fig.
3 depicts. In this way, those subclasses can contain the measures of the specific Article referred
to the specific agent. The tasks related to an agent are not strictly associated with it. As Figure
Figure 3: MemberState entity specialisation
4a shows, the tasks that MemberState should perform are inherited. We associate the measures
of one Article to the corresponding entity, for example, the measures of Article 7 are associated
with the Article7 entity. Then, we associate the MemberState entity with the Article7 entity: this
allows us to decouple the security measures from entities that must comply with them. Moreover,
the association facilitates readability in general since the security measures are associated with an
entity representing an article and with the actor who is called to comply with those measures. For
example, Figure 4a shows actor Member State to be compliant with the measures of the entities
that represent, respectively compliance with Article 7 and Article 10.
Following the semantic interpretation described in Section 5, we represent Article 7 and
the related policies as illustrated in Figure 4b in order to guarantee that Article 7 compliant
member states verify the related rules, and this can be later verified automatically by reasoning.
Restrictions on the policies could be further qualified if needed to reduce the range of applicability.
Further, we associate qualifying elements to the related entities through data-type restrictions
such as CyberSecurityIncidentResponsePlan has SubmissionMonths max 3 xsd:int.
The integration with OASIS should be considered working in progress, as previously mentioned.
If on one hand, we have a defined approach for the representation of the NIS 2 directive,
fully integrating the corresponding ontology with OASIS requires that it should be perfectly
(a) Example of representing the Member State (b) Definition of Article 7 in NIS O NTOLOGY
Figure 4: A fragment of the NIS 2 Ontology hierarchy.
superimposed, for example by associating specific behaviours to agents. That exceeds the scope
of this paper and will be explored as future work.
6.2. Verification of compliance and check of measures
The task of compliance verification is complex. It is usually done via auditing between operators,
hence causing inconsistencies at times. Using an automatic and time-saver instrument would
reduce time and related costs. Ontologies, as mentioned, meet those prerogatives.
Once the previous steps are applied to all security measures, we get a graph with some clusters
that identify the most important entities in the directive. In order to validate the verification of
compliance mechanism and its results, the last step of our approach is to take into account a
generic agent, for example, the MemberState entity.
We can check its compliance with articles 7 and 10, which currently compose NIS O NTOLOGY.
We created three test individuals (see Figure 5), namely, individual1, which owns all security
measures of both articles, individual2, which owns no security measure, and individual3, which
owns only some security measures.
(a) The first test individual (b) The third test individual
Figure 5: Test individuals
By running the reasoner, we can see in Figure 5 the inferences that are carried out. Concerning
the first test individual, it is correctly inferred as an instance of MemberState since it fulfils all the
security measures. Concerning the third test individual, we purposely choose to exclude only the
two rules of Article 10, which are designate CSIRT and ensureReportingVulnerabilityTo CSIRT,
hence it is recognised as compliant only with Article 7. Finally, the second test individual has no
meaningful inference, because it owns no sufficient rules to derive compliance with both articles.
7. Conclusions and future works
We proposed an ontological approach for the characterisation of security directives. The approach
allowed us to propose a structural solution for translating security documents to a mathematically-
driven world. The paper proposes just an approach then proper methodologies and principles
for the ontological design will be later addressed deeply. The target of the work was the NIS 2
directive but analogous considerations can be made for similar directives. As a result, we defined
an ontology termed NIS O NTOLOGY, which currently covers articles 7 and 10 of the NIS 2.
While this is clearly incomplete with respect to the whole directive, it provides a paradigmatic
representation of some of the essential entities and relations that the directive stands upon. Our
approach meets the FAIR principles and the NIS O NTOLOGY may help security analysts to
quickly verify the status of the institutions’ compliance, resulting in an efficient search engine for
security measures.
The target of future works is to expand the prototype to the entire directive and to refine
the correlation with the OASIS ontology. Our ontology, once completed, could be integrated
with “Towards Unified European Cyber Incident and Crisis Management Ontology” proposed
by ENISA [18]. That would be possible since both revolve around common entities, such as
Member State and threat.
Acknowledgments
Gianpietro Castiglione acknowledges a studentship by Intrapresa S.r.l. and Italian “Ministero
dell’Università e della Ricerca” (D.M. n. 352/2022). Giampaolo Bella acknowledges financial
support from: PNRR MUR project PE0000013-FAIR.
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