Liquid Journals: Knowledge Dissemination in the Web Era

In this paper we redefine the notion of "scientific journal" to update it to the age of the Web. We explore the historical reasons behind the current journal model, and we show that this model is essentially the same today, even if the Web has made dissemination essentially free. We propose a notion of liquid and personal journals that evolve continuously in time and that are targeted to serve individuals or communities of arbitrarily small or large scales. The liquid journals provide "interesting" content, in the form of "scientific contributions" that are "related" to a certain paper, topic, or area, and that are posted (on their web site, repositories, traditional journals) by "inspiring" researchers. As such, the liquid journal separates the notion of "publishing" (which can be achieved by submitting to traditional peer review journals or just by posting content on the Web) from the appearance of contributions into the journals, which are essentially collections of content. In this paper we introduce the liquid journal model, and demonstrate through some examples its value to individuals and communities. Finally, we describe an architecture and a working prototype that implements the proposed model

A high-level semiotic trust agent scoring model for collaborative virtual organisations

In this paper, we describe how a semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent, can be used to address “soft” trust issues in the context of collaborative Virtual Organisations (VO). The intention is to offer all parties better support for trust (as reputation) management including the reduction of risk and improved reliability of VO e-services. The semiotic ladder is intended to support the VO e-service lifecycle through the articulation of e-trust at various levels of system abstraction, including trust as measurable confidence. At the social level, reputation and reliability measures of e-trust are the relevant dimensions as regards choice of VO partner and are also relevant to the negotiation of service level agreements between the VO partners. By contrast, at the lower levels of the trust ladder, e-trust measures typically address the degree to which secure sign on and message level security conforms to various tangible technological security protocols. The novel trust agent provides the e-service consumer with an objective measure of the trustworthiness of the e-service at run-time, just prior to its actual consumption. Specifically, VO e-service consumer confidence level is informed, by leveraging third party objective evidence. This evidence comprises a set of Corporate Governance (CG) scores. These scores are used as a trust proxy for the "real" owner of the VO. There are also inherent limitations associated with the use of CG scores. These are duly acknowledged

Secure and robust multi-constrained QoS aware routing algorithm for VANETs

Secure QoS routing algorithms are a fundamental part of wireless networks that aim to provide services with QoS and security guarantees. In Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), vehicles perform routing functions, and at the same time act as end-systems thus routing control messages are transmitted unprotected over wireless channels. The QoS of the entire network could be degraded by an attack on the routing process, and manipulation of the routing control messages. In this paper, we propose a novel secure and reliable multi-constrained QoS aware routing algorithm for VANETs. We employ the Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) technique to compute feasible routes in VANETs subject to multiple QoS constraints determined by the data traffic type. Moreover, we extend the VANET-oriented Evolving Graph (VoEG) model to perform plausibility checks on the exchanged routing control messages among vehicles. Simulation results show that the QoS can be guaranteed while applying security mechanisms to ensure a reliable and robust routing service

TRIDEnT: Building Decentralized Incentives for Collaborative Security

Sophisticated mass attacks, especially when exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, have the potential to cause destructive damage to organizations and critical infrastructure. To timely detect and contain such attacks, collaboration among the defenders is critical. By correlating real-time detection information (alerts) from multiple sources (collaborative intrusion detection), defenders can detect attacks and take the appropriate defensive measures in time. However, although the technical tools to facilitate collaboration exist, real-world adoption of such collaborative security mechanisms is still underwhelming. This is largely due to a lack of trust and participation incentives for companies and organizations. This paper proposes TRIDEnT, a novel collaborative platform that aims to enable and incentivize parties to exchange network alert data, thus increasing their overall detection capabilities. TRIDEnT allows parties that may be in a competitive relationship, to selectively advertise, sell and acquire security alerts in the form of (near) real-time peer-to-peer streams. To validate the basic principles behind TRIDEnT, we present an intuitive game-theoretic model of alert sharing, that is of independent interest, and show that collaboration is bound to take place infinitely often. Furthermore, to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we instantiate our design in a decentralized manner using Ethereum smart contracts and provide a fully functional prototype.Comment: 28 page