Service Contracts: Beyond Trust in Service Oriented Architectures

National audienceThe Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is considered as the most promising paradigm over the last few years for delivering functionalities and allowing business cooperation. In SOA, the traditional vision of security aims to keep properties such as availability, authenticity and confidentiality by protecting the web service itself. However, in such an approach, the particularities of the human interaction in regard to the behaviors of the service stakeholders have been until now based only on trust. In this article, we present an approach based on machine readable contracts and evidences for improving the traditional web service-centered security. Similarly, the usefulness of this approach in context of semi-automatic auditing and risk management is discussed. \textcopyright 2016 Lavoisier.The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is considered as the most promising paradigm over the last few years for delivering functionalities and allowing business cooperation. In SOA, the traditional vision of security aims to keep properties such as availability, authenticity and confidentiality by protecting the web service itself. However, in such an approach, the particularities of the human interaction in regard to the behaviors of the service stakehold-ers have been until now based only on trust. In this article, we present an approach based on machine readable contracts and evidences for improving the traditional web service-centered security. Similarly, the usefulness of this approach in context of semi-automatic auditing and risk management is discussed. RÉSUMÉ. L'architecture orientée services (SOA) est considérée comme le paradigme le plus prometteur au cours des dernières années pour fournir des fonctionnalités et faciliter la coo-pération commerciale.Dans le SOA, la vision traditionnelle de la sécurité vise à garder des propriétés telles que la disponibilité, l'authenticité et la confidentialité, en protégant le service Web lui-même. Cependant, dans une telle approche les particularités de l'interaction humaine en ce qui concerne les comportements des parties prenantes de service ont été jusqu'à présent basée seulement sur la confiance. Dans cet article, nous présentons une approche basée sur des contrats lisibles par la machine et des preuves pour enrichir la vision traditionannelle de la sécurité axée sur les services web. De même, l'utilité de cette approche dans le contexte de la gestion de risques et l'audit semi-automatique est discutée

Can we trust the Internet? (new book)

Can we trust the Internet? There is no more fundamental question about news media today. And yet it is mired in myth and misunderstanding. Here is a chapter I have written for a new book, Beyond Trust,edited by John Mair which has collected a variety of perspectives

Beyond trust: why American classical jurists and economists could not love the corporation

Given the unconditional favour that scholars imbued with classical ideas should bestow on any manifestation of business freedom and entrepreneurial spirit, it was not a given that classical jurists and economists would join the ranks of those who in the late 19th century complained about the corporatisation of the American economy. The usual explanation is that they did so out of doctrinal and practical concerns for the effect of the associated rise of monopolies and trusts. A complementary account exists, however, offered by law historians and based on the doctrinal controversies about the true nature of corporations triggered by the famous Santa Clara decision (1886) of the US Supreme Court. The paper casts new light on the latter account by uncovering those aspects of classical economics that made it impossible for its supporters – economists and jurists alike – to unreservedly support the corporate form before and beyond the trust problem

Beyond Trust Species: The Conservation Potential of the National Wildlife Refuge System in the Wake of Climate Change

Over the last two decades, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (“FWS”) has come to define its conservation mission in the context of species protection. The concept of “trust species” is now a common focal point for the myriad responsibilities of the FWS. This has become problematic for one of the major programs of the agency: management of the world’s largest biodiversity conservation network, the national wildlife refuge system (“NWRS”). A major legislative overhaul of the NWRS charter and the imperatives of climate change adaptation have weakened the concept as a reliable touchstone for NWRS management and expansion. The FWS should build on its culture and history to respond to new challenges that the conservation network cannot meet with the “trust species” concept alone. While management to benefit specific species offers a simple measure of accomplishment, as a policy tool it creates more problems than it solves. Adherence to the “trust species” theme limits full engagement with, and abdicates the FWS’ leadership role in, contemporary conservation challenges and science. This article makes the case for alternative measures of NWRS conservation success that move beyond just counting populations. We begin in Part I by tracing the rise of the trust concept to prominence as the dominant FWS conservation theme. We illustrate how the idea works in practice with three examples. In Part II we proceed to analyze what the “trust species” theme offers for conservation objectives and what problems it presents for the NWRS. We conclude that, on balance, its strengths do not justify its predominance. In particular, the trust concept has four problems. First, it fails to capture the full, systemic statutory mandate, and thus neglects an important part of Congress’ instructions. Second, it invites confusion with real federal trust duties pertaining to natural resources damages and relations with Indian tribes. Third, it risks conflation with state public trust doctrines, and therefore blurs the distinction between the FWS’ functions and the state role in wildlife management. Fourth, it narrows the FWS’ conservation vision to only a few elements of the broader ecological concerns animating landscape-level nature protection. Part III shows how climate change, ecosystem management, and land acquisition would be better addressed through a broader approach. We conclude with some suggestions for alternatives to the reductive “trust species” focus. Ecological integrity offers a more accurate theme for the NWRS goals, a more robust tool for adapting to climate change, and a concept that the scientific literature recognizes and quantifies

A quiet politics of being together: Miriam and Rose

This paper draws on fieldwork with a befriending scheme that pairs refugees, asylum seekers and local residents in the north east of England. It explores the ways in which a ‘quiet politics’ of encounter, embedded in intimate relationships, is caught up in and productive of complex inter-scale geographies, highlighting the ebbs and flows across security and insecurity. Critically, it foregrounds the relationality of emotions in enabling and maintaining intimate-geopolitics

Simultaneous Inference of User Representations and Trust

Inferring trust relations between social media users is critical for a number of applications wherein users seek credible information. The fact that available trust relations are scarce and skewed makes trust prediction a challenging task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on exploring representation learning for trust prediction. We propose an approach that uses only a small amount of binary user-user trust relations to simultaneously learn user embeddings and a model to predict trust between user pairs. We empirically demonstrate that for trust prediction, our approach outperforms classifier-based approaches which use state-of-the-art representation learning methods like DeepWalk and LINE as features. We also conduct experiments which use embeddings pre-trained with DeepWalk and LINE each as an input to our model, resulting in further performance improvement. Experiments with a dataset of $\sim$356K user pairs show that the proposed method can obtain an high F-score of 92.65%.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of ASONAM'17. Please cite that versio

An Exploratory Study on the Level of Trust towards Online Retailers among Consumers in the United Kingdom and Malaysia

This study aims to investigate the extant level of trust towards online retailers among consumers in two different geographical and cultural locations – UK and Malaysia based on Michell’s et al. trust model. The objectives of this study are: 1. To identify the predictive variables of customers’ trust towards online retailers 2. To ascertain the extent of the consumer trust variable as being the essential element of online shopping 3. To analyse the differences in perception of online trust between consumers in the United Kingdom and Malaysia The study showed that online retailers are comparatively more trusted in UK than in Malaysia indicative by the higher average levels of trust from consumers in the UK. Additionally, the UK had a higher age group in the 25 – 34 category contributing the highest average trust value compared to Malaysia’s highest average trust value found in the lower 18 – 24 age group. There were a relatively higher percentage of male users; 66 per cent and 78 per cent in the UK and Malaysia respectively. Multiple stepwise regressions were used to analyse the level of trust against the selected trust correlates