Biblio

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) is an important technique for cloud computing. SSE allows encrypted critical data stored on an untrusted cloud server to be searched using keywords, returning correct data, but the keywords and data content are unknown by the server. However, an SSE database is not practical because the data is generally frequently modified even when stored on a remote server, since the server cannot update the encrypted data without decryption. Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) is designed to support this requirement. DSSE allows adding or deleting encrypted data on the server without decryption. Many DSSE systems have been proposed, based on link-list structures or blind storage (a new primitive). Each has advantages and drawbacks regarding function, extensibility, and efficiency. For a real system, the most important aspect is the tradeoff between performance and security. Therefore, we implemented several DSSE systems to compare their efficiency and security, and identify the various disadvantages with a view to developing an improved system.

This exploratory investigation aims to discuss current status and challenges, especially in aspect of security and trust problems, of digital supply chain management system with applying some advanced information technologies, such as Internet of Things, cloud computing and blockchain, for improving various system performance and properties, i.e. transparency, visibility, accountability, traceability and reliability. This paper introduces the general histories and definitions, in terms of information science, of the supply chain and relevant technologies which have been applied or are potential to be applied on supply chain with purpose of lowering cost, facilitating its security and convenience. It provides a comprehensive review of current relative research work and industrial cases from several famous companies. It also illustrates requirements or performance of digital supply chain system, security management and trust issues. Finally, this paper concludes several potential or existing security issues and challenges which supply chain management is facing.

Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) have been developed in recent years to set up cloud computing architecture. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a cloud-delivered model designed by the provider to gather a set of IT resources which are furnished as services for user Virtual Machine Image (VMI) provisioning and management. Openstack is one of the most useful CMP which has been developed for industry and academic researches to simulate IaaS classical processes such as launch and store user VMI instance. In this paper, the main purpose is to adopt a security policy for a secure launch user VMI across a trust cloud environment founded on a combination of enhanced TPM remote attestation and cryptographic techniques to ensure confidentiality and integrity of user VMI requirements.

The growing trend toward information technology increases the amount of data travelling over the network links. The problem of detecting anomalies in data streams has increased with the growth of internet connectivity. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new concept of computer networking that can adapt and support these growing trends. However, the centralized nature of the SDN design is challenged by the need for an efficient method for traffic monitoring against traffic anomalies caused by misconfigured devices or ongoing attacks. In this paper, we propose a new model for traffic behavior monitoring that aims to ensure trusted communication links between the network devices. The main objective of this model is to confirm that the behavior of the traffic streams matches the instructions provided by the SDN controller, which can help to increase the trust between the SDN controller and its covered infrastructure components. According to our preliminary implementation, the behavior monitoring unit is able to read all traffic information and perform a validation process that reports any mismatching traffic to the controller.

Appending digital signatures and certificates to messages guarantee data integrity and ensure non-repudiation, but do not identify greedy authenticated nodes. Trust evolves if some reputable and trusted node verifies the node, data and evaluates the trustworthiness of the node using an accurate metric. But, even if the verifying party is a trusted centralized party, there is opacity and obscurity in computed reputation rating. The trusted party maps it with the node's identity, but how is it evaluated and what inputs derive the reputation rating remains hidden, thus concealment of transparency leads to privacy. Besides, the malevolent nodes might collude together for defamatory actions against reliable nodes, and eventually bad mouth these nodes or praise malicious nodes collaboratively. Thus, we cannot always assume the fairness of the nodes as the rating they give to any node might not be a fair one. In this paper, we propose a smart contract-based approach to update and query the reputation of nodes, stored and maintained by IPFS distributed storage. The use case particularly deals with an emergency scenario, dealing against colluding attacks. Our scheme is implemented using MATLAB simulation. The results show how smart contracts are capable of accurately identifying trustworthy nodes and record the reputation of a node transparently and immutably.

The operating system is extremely important for both "Made in China 2025" and ubiquitous electric power Internet of Things. By investigating of five key requirements for ubiquitous electric power Internet of Things at the OS level (performance, ecosystem, information security, functional security, developer framework), this paper introduces the intelligent NARI microkernel Operating System and its innovative schemes. It is implemented with microkernel architecture based on the trusted computing. Some technologies such as process based fine-grained real-time scheduling algorithm, sigma0 efficient message channel and service process binding in multicore are applied to improve system performance. For better ecological expansion, POSIX standard API is compatible, Linux container, embedded virtualization and intelligent interconnection technology are supported. Native process sandbox and mimicry defense are considered for security mechanism design. Multi-level exception handling and multidimensional partition isolation are adopted to provide High Reliability. Theorem-assisted proof tools based on Isabelle/HOL is used to verify the design and implementation of NARI microkernel OS. Developer framework including tools, kit and specification is discussed when developing both system software and user software on this IoT OS.

On ARM processors with TrustZone security extension, asynchronous introspection mechanisms have been developed in the secure world to detect security policy violations in the normal world. These mechanisms provide security protection via passively checking the normal world snapshot. However, since previous secure world checking solutions require to suspend the entire rich OS, asynchronous introspection has not been widely adopted in the real world. Given a multi-core ARM system that can execute the two worlds simultaneously on different cores, secure world introspection can check the rich OS without suspension. However, we identify a new normal-world evasion attack that can defeat the asynchronous introspection by removing the attacking traces in parallel from one core when the security checking is performing on another core. We perform a systematic study on this attack and present its efficiency against existing asynchronous introspection mechanisms. As the countermeasure, we propose a secure and trustworthy asynchronous introspection mechanism called SATIN, which can efficiently detect the evasion attacks by increasing the attackers' evasion time cost and decreasing the defender's execution time under a safe limit. We implement a prototype on an ARM development board and the experimental results show that SATIN can effectively prevent evasion attacks on multi-core systems with a minor system overhead.

Generally, methods of authentication and identification utilized in asserting users' credentials directly affect security of offered services. In a federated environment, service owners must trust external credentials and make access control decisions based on Assurance Information received from remote Identity Providers (IdPs). Communities (e.g. NIST, IETF and etc.) have tried to provide a coherent and justifiable architecture in order to evaluate Assurance Information and define Assurance Levels (AL). Expensive deployment, limited service owners' authority to define their own requirements and lack of compatibility between heterogeneous existing standards can be considered as some of the unsolved concerns that hinder developers to openly accept published works. By assessing the advantages and disadvantages of well-known models, a comprehensive, flexible and compatible solution is proposed to value and deploy assurance levels through a central entity called Proxy.

This paper considers the use of novel technologies for mitigating attacks that aim at compromising intrusion detection systems (IDSs). Solutions based on collaborative intrusion detection networks (CIDNs) could increase the resilience against such attacks as they allow IDS nodes to gain knowledge from each other by sharing information. However, despite the vast research in this area, trust management issues still pose significant challenges and recent works investigate whether these could be addressed by relying on blockchain and related distributed ledger technologies. Towards that direction, the paper proposes the use of a trust-based blockchain in CIDNs, referred to as trust-chain, to protect the integrity of the information shared among the CIDN peers, enhance their accountability, and secure their collaboration by thwarting insider attacks. A consensus protocol is proposed for CIDNs, which is a combination of a proof-of-stake and proof-of-work protocols, to enable collaborative IDS nodes to maintain a reliable and tampered-resistant trust-chain.

Distributed applications cannot assume that their security policies will be enforced on untrusted hosts. Trusted execution environments (TEEs) combined with cryptographic mechanisms enable execution of known code on an untrusted host and the exchange of confidential and authenticated messages with it. TEEs do not, however, establish the trustworthiness of code executing in a TEE. Thus, developing secure applications using TEEs requires specialized expertise and careful auditing. This paper presents DFLATE, a core security calculus for distributed applications with TEEs. DFLATE offers high-level abstractions that reflect both the guarantees and limitations of the underlying security mechanisms they are based on. The accuracy of these abstractions is exhibited by asymmetry between confidentiality and integrity in our formal results: DFLATE enforces a strong form of noninterference for confidentiality, but only a weak form for integrity. This reflects the asymmetry of the security guarantees of a TEE: a malicious host cannot access secrets in the TEE or modify its contents, but they can suppress or manipulate the sequence of its inputs and outputs. Therefore DFLATE cannot protect against the suppression of high-integrity messages, but when these messages are delivered, their contents cannot have been influenced by an attacker.

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides connectivity between heterogeneous devices in different applications, such as smart wildlife, supply chain and traffic management. Trust management system (TMS) assesses the trustworthiness of service with respect to its quality. Under different context information, a service provider may be trusted in one context but not in another. The existing context-aware trust models usually store trust values under different contexts and search the closest (to a given context) record to evaluate the trustworthiness of a service. However, it is not suitable for distributed resource-constrained IoT devices which have small memory and low power. Reputation systems are applied in many trust models where trustor obtains recommendations from others. In context-based trust evaluation, it requires interactive queries to find relevant information from remote devices. The communication overhead and energy consumption are issues in low power networks like 6LoWPAN. In this paper, we propose a new context-aware trust model for lightweight IoT devices. The proposed model provides a trustworthiness overview of a service provider without storing past behavior records, that is, constant size storage. The proposed model allows a trustor to decide the significance of context items. This could result in distinctive decisions under the same trustworthiness record. We also show the performance of the proposed model under different attacks.

Fog and Edge computing provide a large pool of resources at the edge of the network that may be used for distributed computing. Fog infrastructure heterogeneity also results in complex configuration of distributed applications on computing nodes. Linux containers are a mainstream technique allowing to run packaged applications and micro services. However, running applications on remote hosts owned by third parties is challenging because of untrusted operating systems and hardware maintained by third parties. To meet such challenges, we may leverage trusted execution mechanisms. In this work, we propose a model for distributed computing on Fog infrastructures using Linux containers secured by Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology. We implement our model on a Docker and OpenSGX platform. The result is a secure and flexible approach for distributed computing on Fog infrastructures.

Cyber-has often been considered as a coordination and control, as opposed to collaborative influence, media. This conceptual-design paper, uniquely, builds upon a number of entangled, cross disciplinary research strands – integrating engineering and conflict studies – and a detailed literature review to propose a new paradigm of assurance and deterrence models. We consider an ontology for Cyber-sûréte, which combines both the social trusts necessary for [knowledge &, information] assurance such as collaboration by social influence (CSI) and the technological controls and rules for secure information management referred as coordination by rule and control (CRC). We posit Cyber-sûréte as enabling both a 'safe-to-fail' ecology (in which learning, testing and adaptation can take place) within a fail-safe supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA type) system, e.g. in a nuclear power plant. Building upon traditional state-based threat analysis, we consider Warning Time and the Threat equation with relation to policies for managing Cyber-Deterrence. We examine how the goods of Cyber-might be galvanised so as to encourage virtuous behaviour and deter and / or dissuade ne'er-do-wells through multiple transparencies. We consider how the Deterrence-escalator may be managed by identifying both weak influence and strong control signals so as to create a more benign and responsive cyber-ecology, in which strengths can be exploited and weaknesses identified. Finally, we consider declaratory / mutual transparencies as opposed to legalistic / controlled transparency.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm based on heuristic similarity and trust measure, in order to alleviate the problem of data sparsity, cold start and trust measure. Firstly, a new similarity measure is implemented by weighted fusion of multiple similarity influence factors obtained from the rating matrix, so that the similarity measure becomes more accurate. Then, a user trust relationship computing model is implemented by constructing the user's trust network based on the trust propagation theory. On this basis, a SIMT collaborative filtering algorithm is designed which integrates trust and similarity instead of the similarity in traditional collaborative filtering algorithm. Further, an improved K nearest neighbor recommendation based on clustering algorithm is implemented for generation of a better recommendation list. Finally, a comparative experiment on FilmTrust dataset shows that the proposed algorithm has improved the quality and accuracy of recommendation, thus overcome the problem of data sparsity, cold start and trust measure to a certain extent.

In sensor-enabled Internet of Things (IoT), nodes are deployed in an open and remote environment, therefore, are vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Recently, trust-based schemes have played a pivotal role in addressing nodes' misbehavior attacks in IoT. However, the existing trust-based schemes apply network wide dissemination of the control packets that consume excessive energy in the quest of trust evaluation, which ultimately weakens the network lifetime. In this context, this paper presents an energy efficient trust evaluation (EETE) scheme that makes use of hierarchical trust evaluation model to alleviate the malicious effects of illegitimate sensor nodes and restricts network wide dissemination of trust requests to reduce the energy consumption in clustered-sensor enabled IoT. The proposed EETE scheme incorporates three dilemma game models to reduce additional needless transmissions while balancing the trust throughout the network. Specially: 1) a cluster formation game that promotes the nodes to be cluster head (CH) or cluster member to avoid the extraneous cluster; 2) an optimal cluster formation dilemma game to affirm the minimum number of trust recommendations for maintaining the balance of the trust in a cluster; and 3) an activity-based trust dilemma game to compute the Nash equilibrium that represents the best strategy for a CH to launch its anomaly detection technique which helps in mitigation of malicious activity. Simulation results show that the proposed EETE scheme outperforms the current trust evaluation schemes in terms of detection rate, energy efficiency and trust evaluation time for clustered-sensor enabled IoT.

In Cloud Manufacturing trust is an important, under investigated issue. This paper proceeds the noncommittal phase of the grounded theory method approach by investigating the trust topic in several research streams, defining the problem domain. This novel approach fills a research gap and can be treated as a snapshot and blueprint of research. Findings were accomplished by a structured literature review and are able to help future researchers in pursuing the integrative phase in Grounded Theory by building on the preliminary result of this paper.

Social media have become increasingly popular for the sharing and spreading of user-generated content due to their easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. Meanwhile, social media also enable the wide propagation of cyber frauds, which leverage fake information sources to reach an ulterior goal. The prevalence of untrustworthy information sources on social media can have significant negative societal effects. In a trustworthy social media system, trust calculation technology has become a key demand for the identification of information sources. Trust, as one of the most complex concepts in network communities, has multi-criteria properties. However, the existing work only focuses on single trust factor, and does not consider the complexity of trust relationships in social computing completely. In this paper, a multi-criteria trustworthiness calculation mechanism called Info-Trust is proposed for information sources, in which identity-based trust, behavior-based trust, relation-based trust, and feedback-based trust factors are incorporated to present an accuracy-enhanced full view of trustworthiness evaluation of information sources. More importantly, the weights of these factors are dynamically assigned by the ordered weighted averaging and weighted moving average (OWA-WMA) combination algorithm. This mechanism surpasses the limitations of existing approaches in which the weights are assigned subjectively. The experimental results based on the real-world datasets from Sina Weibo demonstrate that the proposed mechanism achieves greater accuracy and adaptability in trustworthiness identification of the network information.

In mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN), data imprecision is a common problem. Decision making in real time applications may be greatly affected by a minor error. Even though there are many existing techniques that take advantage of the spatio-temporal characteristics exhibited in mobile environments, few measure the trustworthiness of sensor data accuracy. We propose a unique online context-aware data cleaning method that measures trustworthiness by employing an initial candidate reduction through the analysis of trust parameters used in financial markets theory. Sensors with similar trajectory behaviors are assigned trust scores estimated through the calculation of “betas” for finding the most accurate data to trust. Instead of devoting all the trust into a single candidate sensor's data to perform the cleaning, a Diversified Trust Portfolio (DTP) is generated based on the selected set of spatially autocorrelated candidate sensors. Our results show that samples cleaned by the proposed method exhibit lower percent error when compared to two well-known and effective data cleaning algorithms in tested outdoor and indoor scenarios.

Trust is an important topic in today's interconnected world. Breaches of trust in today's systems has had profound effects upon us all, and they are very difficult and costly to fix especially when caused by flaws in the system's architecture. Trust modeling can expose these types of issues, but modeling trust in complex multi-tiered system architectures can be very difficult. Often experts have differing views of trust and how it applies to systems within their domain. This work presents a graph-based modeling methodology that normalizes the application of trust across disparate system domains allowing the modeling of complex intersystem trust relationships. An algorithm is proposed that applies graph theory to model, validate and evaluate trust in system architectures. Also, it provides the means to apply metrics to compare and prioritize the effectiveness of trust management in system and component architectures. The results produced by the algorithm can be used in conjunction with systems engineering processes to ensure both trust and the efficient use of resources.

Mobile cloud computing has the features of resource constraints, openness, and uncertainty which leads to the high uncertainty on its quality of service (QoS) provision and serious security risks. Therefore, when faced with complex service requirements, an efficient and reliable service composition approach is extremely important. In addition, preference learning is also a key factor to improve user experiences. In order to address them, this paper introduces a three-layered trust-enabled service composition model for the mobile cloud computing systems. Based on the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method, we design a novel and integrated trust management model. Service brokers are equipped with a learning module enabling them to better analyze customers' service preferences, especially in cases when the details of a service request are not totally disclosed. Because traditional methods cannot totally reflect the autonomous collaboration between the mobile cloud entities, a prototype system based on the multi-agent platform JADE is implemented to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed strategies. The experimental results show that our approach improves the transaction success rate and user satisfaction.

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing is currently a new research hotspot. However, the lack of trust between IoT edge devices has hindered the universal acceptance of IoT edge computing as outsourced computing services. In order to increase the adoption of IoT edge computing applications, first, IoT edge computing architecture should establish efficient trust calculation mechanism to alleviate the concerns of numerous users. In this paper, a reliable and lightweight trust mechanism is originally proposed for IoT edge devices based on multi-source feedback information fusion. First, due to the multi-source feedback mechanism is used for global trust calculation, our trust calculation mechanism is more reliable against bad-mouthing attacks caused by malicious feedback providers. Then, we adopt lightweight trust evaluating mechanism for cooperations of IoT edge devices, which is suitable for largescale IoT edge computing because it facilitates low-overhead trust computing algorithms. At the same time, we adopt a feedback information fusion algorithm based on objective information entropy theory, which can overcome the limitations of traditional trust schemes, whereby the trust factors are weighted manually or subjectively. And the experimental results show that the proposed trust calculation scheme significantly outperforms existing approaches in both computational efficiency and reliability.

The Internet of Things is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity, requiring massive data processing and storage. Unfortunately, because of the unique characteristics of resource constraints, short-range communication, and self-organization in IoT, it always resorts to the cloud or fog nodes for outsourced computation and storage, which has brought about a series of novel challenging security and privacy threats. For this reason, one of the critical challenges of having numerous IoT devices is the capacity to manage them and their data. A specific concern is from which devices or Edge clouds to accept join requests or interaction requests. This paper discusses a design concept for developing the IoT data management platform, along with a data management and lineage traceability implementation of the platform based on blockchain and smart contracts, which approaches the two major challenges: how to implement effective data management and enrich rational interoperability for trusted groups of linked Things; And how to settle conflicts between untrusted IoT devices and its requests taking into account security and privacy preserving. Experimental results show that the system scales well with the loss of computing and communication performance maintaining within the acceptable range, works well to effectively defend against unauthorized access and empower data provenance and transparency, which verifies the feasibility and efficiency of the design concept to provide privacy, fine-grained, and integrity data management over the IoT devices by introducing the blockchain-based data management platform.

Database outsourcing introduces a new paradigm, called Database as a Service (DBaaS). Database Service Providers (DSPs) have the ability to host outsourced databases and provide efficient facilities for their users. However, the data and the execution of database queries are under the control of the DSP, which is not always a trusted authority. Therefore, our problem is to ensure the outsourced database security. To address this problem, we propose a Secure scheme to provide Confidentiality and Integrity of Query results for Cloud Databases (SCIQ-CD). The performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme is secure and efficient for practical deployment.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a revolutionary paradigm to manage cloud infrastructure. SDN lacks scalable trust setup and verification mechanism between Data Plane-Control Plane elements, Control Plane elements, and Control Plane-Application Plane. Trust management schemes like Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used currently in SDN are slow for trust establishment in a larger cloud environment. We propose a distributed trust mechanism - TRUFL to establish and verify trust in SDN. The distributed framework utilizes parallelism in trust management, in effect faster transfer rates and reduced latency compared to centralized trust management. The TRUFL framework scales well with the number of OpenFlow rules when compared to existing research works.

Traditionally, a Certification Authority (CA) is required to sign, manage, verify and revoke public key certificates. Multiple CAs together form the CA-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). The use of a PKI forces one to place trust in the CAs, which have proven to be a single point-of-failure on multiple occasions. Blockchain has emerged as a transformational technology that replaces centralized trusted third parties with a decentralized, publicly verifiable, peer-to-peer data store which maintains data integrity among nodes through various consensus protocols. In this paper, we deploy three blockchain-based alternatives to the CA-based PKI for supporting IoT devices, based on Emercoin Name Value Service (NVS), smart contracts by Ethereum blockchain, and Ethereum Light Sync client. We compare these approaches with CA-based PKI and show that they are much more efficient in terms of computational and storage requirements in addition to providing a more robust and scalable PKI.