SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators

Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users' productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit

A Decentralised Digital Identity Architecture

Current architectures to validate, certify, and manage identity are based on centralised, top-down approaches that rely on trusted authorities and third-party operators. We approach the problem of digital identity starting from a human rights perspective, with a primary focus on identity systems in the developed world. We assert that individual persons must be allowed to manage their personal information in a multitude of different ways in different contexts and that to do so, each individual must be able to create multiple unrelated identities. Therefore, we first define a set of fundamental constraints that digital identity systems must satisfy to preserve and promote privacy as required for individual autonomy. With these constraints in mind, we then propose a decentralised, standards-based approach, using a combination of distributed ledger technology and thoughtful regulation, to facilitate many-to-many relationships among providers of key services. Our proposal for digital identity differs from others in its approach to trust in that we do not seek to bind credentials to each other or to a mutually trusted authority to achieve strong non-transferability. Because the system does not implicitly encourage its users to maintain a single aggregated identity that can potentially be constrained or reconstructed against their interests, individuals and organisations are free to embrace the system and share in its benefits.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

A prototype and demonstrator of Akogrimo’s architecture: An approach of merging grids, SOA, and the mobile Internet

The trend of merging telecommunication infrastructures with traditional Information Technology (IT) infrastructures is ongoing and important for commercial service providers. The driver behind this development is, on one hand, the strong need for enhanced services and on the other hand, the need of telecommunication operators aiming at value-added service provisioning to a wide variety of customers. In the telecommunications sector, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a promising service platform, which may become a ''standard'' for supporting added-value services on top of the next generation network infrastructure. However, since its range of applicability is bound to SIP- enabled services, IMS extensions are being proposed by ''SIPifying'' applications. In parallel to these developments within the traditional IT sector, the notion of Virtual Organizations (VO) enabling collaborative businesses across organizational boundaries is addressed in the framework of Web Services (WS) standards implementing a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Here, concepts for controlled resource and service sharing based on WS and Semantic Technologies have been consolidated. Since the telecommunications sector has become, in the meantime ''mobile'', all concepts brought into this infrastructure must cope with the dynamics mobility brings in. Therefore, within the Akogrimo project the VO concept has been extended towards a Mobile Dynamic Virtual Organization (MDVO) concept, additionally considering key requirements of mobile users and resources. Especial attention is given to ensure the duality of the merge of both, SOA and IMS approaches to holistically support SOA-enabled mobile added-value services and their users. This work describes major results of the Akogrimo project, paying special attention to the overall Akogrimo architecture, the prototype implemented, and the key scenario in which the instantiated Akogrimo architecture shows a very clear picture of applicability, use, and an additional functional evaluation