A Privacy-Preserving Protocol for the Kidney Exchange Problem

Kidney donations from living donors form an attractive alternative to long waiting times on a list for a post-mortem donation. However, even if a living donor for a given patient is found, the donor's kidney might not meet the patient's medical requirements. If several patients are in this position, they may be able to exchange donors in a cyclic fashion. Current algorithmic approaches for determining such exchange cycles neglect the privacy requirements of donors and patients as they require their medical data to be centrally collected and evaluated. In this paper, we present the first distributed privacy-preserving protocol for kidney exchange that ensures the correct computing of the exchange cycles while at the same time protecting the privacy of the patients' sensitive medical data. We prove correctness and security of the new protocol and evaluate its practical performance

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationWe develop a novel framework for friend-to-friend (f2f) distributed services (F3DS) by which applications can easily offer peer-to-peer (p2p) services among social peers with resource sharing governed by approximated levels of social altruism. Our frame- work differs significantly from typical p2p collaboration in that it provides a founda- tion for distributed applications to cooperate based on pre-existing trust and altruism among social peers. With the goal of facilitating the approximation of relative levels of altruism among social peers within F3DS, we introduce a new metric: SocialDistance. SocialDistance is a synthetic metric that combines direct levels of altruism between peers with an altruism decay for each hop to approximate indirect levels of altruism. The resulting multihop altruism levels are used by F3DS applications to proportion and prioritize the sharing of resources with other social peers. We use SocialDistance to implement a novel flash file/patch distribution method, SocialSwarm. SocialSwarm uses the SocialDistance metric as part of its resource allocation to overcome the neces- sity of (and inefficiency created by) resource bartering among friends participating in a BitTorrent swarm. We find that SocialSwarm achieves an average file download time reduction of 25% to 35% in comparison with standard BitTorrent under a variety of configurations and conditions, including file sizes, maximum SocialDistance, as well as leech and seed counts. The most socially connected peers yield up to a 47% decrease in download completion time in comparison with average nonsocial BitTorrent swarms. We also use the F3DS framework to implement novel malware detection application- F3DS Antivirus (F3AV)-and evaluate it on the Amazon cloud. We show that with f2f sharing of resources, F3AV achieves a 65% increase in the detection rate of 0- to 1-day-old malware among social peers as compared to the average of individual scanners. Furthermore, we show that F3AV provides the greatest diversity of mal- ware scanners (and thus malware protection) to social hubs-those nodes that are positioned to provide strategic defense against socially aware malware

DRIVE: A Distributed Economic Meta-Scheduler for the Federation of Grid and Cloud Systems

The computational landscape is littered with islands of disjoint resource providers including commercial Clouds, private Clouds, national Grids, institutional Grids, clusters, and data centers. These providers are independent and isolated due to a lack of communication and coordination, they are also often proprietary without standardised interfaces, protocols, or execution environments. The lack of standardisation and global transparency has the effect of binding consumers to individual providers. With the increasing ubiquity of computation providers there is an opportunity to create federated architectures that span both Grid and Cloud computing providers effectively creating a global computing infrastructure. In order to realise this vision, secure and scalable mechanisms to coordinate resource access are required. This thesis proposes a generic meta-scheduling architecture to facilitate federated resource allocation in which users can provision resources from a range of heterogeneous (service) providers. Efficient resource allocation is difficult in large scale distributed environments due to the inherent lack of centralised control. In a Grid model, local resource managers govern access to a pool of resources within a single administrative domain but have only a local view of the Grid and are unable to collaborate when allocating jobs. Meta-schedulers act at a higher level able to submit jobs to multiple resource managers, however they are most often deployed on a per-client basis and are therefore concerned with only their allocations, essentially competing against one another. In a federated environment the widespread adoption of utility computing models seen in commercial Cloud providers has re-motivated the need for economically aware meta-schedulers. Economies provide a way to represent the different goals and strategies that exist in a competitive distributed environment. The use of economic allocation principles effectively creates an open service market that provides efficient allocation and incentives for participation. The major contributions of this thesis are the architecture and prototype implementation of the DRIVE meta-scheduler. DRIVE is a Virtual Organisation (VO) based distributed economic metascheduler in which members of the VO collaboratively allocate services or resources. Providers joining the VO contribute obligation services to the VO. These contributed services are in effect membership “dues” and are used in the running of the VOs operations – for example allocation, advertising, and general management. DRIVE is independent from a particular class of provider (Service, Grid, or Cloud) or specific economic protocol. This independence enables allocation in federated environments composed of heterogeneous providers in vastly different scenarios. Protocol independence facilitates the use of arbitrary protocols based on specific requirements and infrastructural availability. For instance, within a single organisation where internal trust exists, users can achieve maximum allocation performance by choosing a simple economic protocol. In a global utility Grid no such trust exists. The same meta-scheduler architecture can be used with a secure protocol which ensures the allocation is carried out fairly in the absence of trust. DRIVE establishes contracts between participants as the result of allocation. A contract describes individual requirements and obligations of each party. A unique two stage contract negotiation protocol is used to minimise the effect of allocation latency. In addition due to the co-op nature of the architecture and the use of secure privacy preserving protocols, DRIVE can be deployed in a distributed environment without requiring large scale dedicated resources. This thesis presents several other contributions related to meta-scheduling and open service markets. To overcome the perceived performance limitations of economic systems four high utilisation strategies have been developed and evaluated. Each strategy is shown to improve occupancy, utilisation and profit using synthetic workloads based on a production Grid trace. The gRAVI service wrapping toolkit is presented to address the difficulty web enabling existing applications. The gRAVI toolkit has been extended for this thesis such that it creates economically aware (DRIVE-enabled) services that can be transparently traded in a DRIVE market without requiring developer input. The final contribution of this thesis is the definition and architecture of a Social Cloud – a dynamic Cloud computing infrastructure composed of virtualised resources contributed by members of a Social network. The Social Cloud prototype is based on DRIVE and highlights the ease in which dynamic DRIVE markets can be created and used in different domains

Digitising the Industry Internet of Things Connecting the Physical, Digital and VirtualWorlds

This book provides an overview of the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, ranging from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies in a global context. A successful deployment of IoT technologies requires integration on all layers, be it cognitive and semantic aspects, middleware components, services, edge devices/machines and infrastructures. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC - Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment. The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster and the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT-EPI) and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in the next years. The IoT is bridging the physical world with virtual world and requires sound information processing capabilities for the "digital shadows" of these real things. The research and innovation in nanoelectronics, semiconductor, sensors/actuators, communication, analytics technologies, cyber-physical systems, software, swarm intelligent and deep learning systems are essential for the successful deployment of IoT applications. The emergence of IoT platforms with multiple functionalities enables rapid development and lower costs by offering standardised components that can be shared across multiple solutions in many industry verticals. The IoT applications will gradually move from vertical, single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organisations and people, being one of the essential paradigms of the digital economy. Many of those applications still have to be identified and involvement of end-users including the creative sector in this innovation is crucial. The IoT applications and deployments as integrated building blocks of the new digital economy are part of the accompanying IoT policy framework to address issues of horizontal nature and common interest (i.e. privacy, end-to-end security, user acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues) for providing trusted IoT solutions in a coordinated and consolidated manner across the IoT activities and pilots. In this, context IoT ecosystems offer solutions beyond a platform and solve important technical challenges in the different verticals and across verticals. These IoT technology ecosystems are instrumental for the deployment of large pilots and can easily be connected to or build upon the core IoT solutions for different applications in order to expand the system of use and allow new and even unanticipated IoT end uses. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Digitising industry and IoT as key enabler in the new era of Digital Economy• IoT Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• IoT in the digital industrial context: Digital Single Market• Integration of heterogeneous systems and bridging the virtual, digital and physical worlds• Federated IoT platforms and interoperability• Evolution from intelligent devices to connected systems of systems by adding new layers of cognitive behaviour, artificial intelligence and user interfaces.• Innovation through IoT ecosystems• Trust-based IoT end-to-end security, privacy framework• User acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues• Internet of Things Application

Digitising the Industry Internet of Things Connecting the Physical, Digital and VirtualWorlds

This book provides an overview of the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, ranging from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies in a global context. A successful deployment of IoT technologies requires integration on all layers, be it cognitive and semantic aspects, middleware components, services, edge devices/machines and infrastructures. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC - Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment. The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster and the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT-EPI) and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in the next years. The IoT is bridging the physical world with virtual world and requires sound information processing capabilities for the "digital shadows" of these real things. The research and innovation in nanoelectronics, semiconductor, sensors/actuators, communication, analytics technologies, cyber-physical systems, software, swarm intelligent and deep learning systems are essential for the successful deployment of IoT applications. The emergence of IoT platforms with multiple functionalities enables rapid development and lower costs by offering standardised components that can be shared across multiple solutions in many industry verticals. The IoT applications will gradually move from vertical, single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organisations and people, being one of the essential paradigms of the digital economy. Many of those applications still have to be identified and involvement of end-users including the creative sector in this innovation is crucial. The IoT applications and deployments as integrated building blocks of the new digital economy are part of the accompanying IoT policy framework to address issues of horizontal nature and common interest (i.e. privacy, end-to-end security, user acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues) for providing trusted IoT solutions in a coordinated and consolidated manner across the IoT activities and pilots. In this, context IoT ecosystems offer solutions beyond a platform and solve important technical challenges in the different verticals and across verticals. These IoT technology ecosystems are instrumental for the deployment of large pilots and can easily be connected to or build upon the core IoT solutions for different applications in order to expand the system of use and allow new and even unanticipated IoT end uses. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Digitising industry and IoT as key enabler in the new era of Digital Economy• IoT Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• IoT in the digital industrial context: Digital Single Market• Integration of heterogeneous systems and bridging the virtual, digital and physical worlds• Federated IoT platforms and interoperability• Evolution from intelligent devices to connected systems of systems by adding new layers of cognitive behaviour, artificial intelligence and user interfaces.• Innovation through IoT ecosystems• Trust-based IoT end-to-end security, privacy framework• User acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues• Internet of Things Application