Intrusiveness, Trust and Argumentation: Using Automated Negotiation to Inhibit the Transmission of Disruptive Information

The question of how to promote the growth and diffusion of information has been extensively addressed by a wide research community. A common assumption underpinning most studies is that the information to be transmitted is useful and of high quality. In this paper, we endorse a complementary perspective. We investigate how the growth and diffusion of high quality information can be managed and maximized by preventing, dampening and minimizing the diffusion of low quality, unwanted information. To this end, we focus on the conflict between pervasive computing environments and the joint activities undertaken in parallel local social contexts. When technologies for distributed activities (e.g. mobile technology) develop, both artifacts and services that enable people to participate in non-local contexts are likely to intrude on local situations. As a mechanism for minimizing the intrusion of the technology, we develop a computational model of argumentation-based negotiation among autonomous agents. A key component in the model is played by trust: what arguments are used and how they are evaluated depend on how trustworthy the agents judge one another. To gain an insight into the implications of the model, we conduct a number of virtual experiments. Results enable us to explore how intrusiveness is affected by trust, the negotiation network and the agents' abilities of conducting argumentation

A Graph-Based Approach to Address Trust and Reputation in Ubiquitous Networks

The increasing popularity of virtual computing environments such as Cloud and Grid computing is helping to drive the realization of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. However, as computing becomes more entrenched in everyday life, the concepts of trust and risk become increasingly important. In this paper, we propose a new graph-based theoretical approach to address trust and reputation in complex ubiquitous networks. We formulate trust as a function of quality of a task and time required to authenticate agent-to-agent relationship based on the Zero-Common Knowledge (ZCK) authentication scheme. This initial representation applies a graph theory concept, accompanied by a mathematical formulation of trust metrics. The approach we propose increases awareness and trustworthiness to agents based on the values estimated for each requested task, we conclude by stating our plans for future work in this area

A New Scheme for Minimizing Malicious Behavior of Mobile Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The performance of Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANET) depends on the cooperation of all active nodes. However, supporting a MANET is a cost-intensive activity for a mobile node. From a single mobile node perspective, the detection of routes as well as forwarding packets consume local CPU time, memory, network-bandwidth, and last but not least energy. We believe that this is one of the main factors that strongly motivate a mobile node to deny packet forwarding for others, while at the same time use their services to deliver its own data. This behavior of an independent mobile node is commonly known as misbehaving or selfishness. A vast amount of research has already been done for minimizing malicious behavior of mobile nodes. However, most of them focused on the methods/techniques/algorithms to remove such nodes from the MANET. We believe that the frequent elimination of such miss-behaving nodes never allowed a free and faster growth of MANET. This paper provides a critical analysis of the recent research wok and its impact on the overall performance of a MANET. In this paper, we clarify some of the misconceptions in the understating of selfishness and miss-behavior of nodes. Moreover, we propose a mathematical model that based on the time division technique to minimize the malicious behavior of mobile nodes by avoiding unnecessary elimination of bad nodes. Our proposed approach not only improves the resource sharing but also creates a consistent trust and cooperation (CTC) environment among the mobile nodes. The simulation results demonstrate the success of the proposed approach that significantly minimizes the malicious nodes and consequently maximizes the overall throughput of MANET than other well known schemes.Comment: 10 pages IEEE format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS July 2009, ISSN 1947 5500, Impact Factor 0.42

Trust Management Model for Cloud Computing Environment

Software as a service or (SaaS) is a new software development and deployment paradigm over the cloud and offers Information Technology services dynamically as "on-demand" basis over the internet. Trust is one of the fundamental security concepts on storing and delivering such services. In general, trust factors are integrated into such existent security frameworks in order to add a security level to entities collaborations through the trust relationship. However, deploying trust factor in the secured cloud environment are more complex engineering task due to the existence of heterogeneous types of service providers and consumers. In this paper, a formal trust management model has been introduced to manage the trust and its properties for SaaS in cloud computing environment. The model is capable to represent the direct trust, recommended trust, reputation etc. formally. For the analysis of the trust properties in the cloud environment, the proposed approach estimates the trust value and uncertainty of each peer by computing decay function, number of positive interactions, reputation factor and satisfaction level for the collected information.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 Figures, Conferenc