127,097 research outputs found
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
OSCAR: A Collaborative Bandwidth Aggregation System
The exponential increase in mobile data demand, coupled with growing user
expectation to be connected in all places at all times, have introduced novel
challenges for researchers to address. Fortunately, the wide spread deployment
of various network technologies and the increased adoption of multi-interface
enabled devices have enabled researchers to develop solutions for those
challenges. Such solutions aim to exploit available interfaces on such devices
in both solitary and collaborative forms. These solutions, however, have faced
a steep deployment barrier.
In this paper, we present OSCAR, a multi-objective, incentive-based,
collaborative, and deployable bandwidth aggregation system. We present the
OSCAR architecture that does not introduce any intermediate hardware nor
require changes to current applications or legacy servers. The OSCAR
architecture is designed to automatically estimate the system's context,
dynamically schedule various connections and/or packets to different
interfaces, be backwards compatible with the current Internet architecture, and
provide the user with incentives for collaboration. We also formulate the OSCAR
scheduler as a multi-objective, multi-modal scheduler that maximizes system
throughput while minimizing energy consumption or financial cost. We evaluate
OSCAR via implementation on Linux, as well as via simulation, and compare our
results to the current optimal achievable throughput, cost, and energy
consumption. Our evaluation shows that, in the throughput maximization mode, we
provide up to 150% enhancement in throughput compared to current operating
systems, without any changes to legacy servers. Moreover, this performance gain
further increases with the availability of connection resume-supporting, or
OSCAR-enabled servers, reaching the maximum achievable upper-bound throughput
Understanding collaboration in volunteer computing systems
Volunteer computing is a paradigm in which devices participating in a distributed environment share part of their resources to help others perform their activities. The effectiveness of this computing paradigm depends on the collaboration attitude adopted by the participating devices. Unfortunately for software designers it is not clear how to contribute with local resources to the shared environment without compromising resources that could then be required by the contributors. Therefore, many designers adopt a conservative position when defining the collaboration strategy to be embedded in volunteer computing applications. This position produces an underutilization of the devices’ local resources and reduces the effectiveness of these solutions. This article presents a study that helps designers understand the impact of adopting a particular collaboration attitude to contribute with local resources to the distributed shared environment. The study considers five collaboration strategies, which are analyzed in computing environments with both, abundance and scarcity of resources. The obtained results indicate that collaboration strategies based on effort-based incentives work better than those using contribution-based incentives. These results also show that the use of effort-based incentives does not jeopardize the availability of local resources for the local needs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Towards distributed architecture for collaborative cloud services in community networks
Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs for communities to collaborate, leading to new services like user-generated content and social computing, and through collaboration, collectively built infrastructures like community networks have also emerged. Community networks get formed when individuals and local organisations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the community’s demand for ICT, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest.
The consolidation of today’s cloud technologies offers now the possibility of collectively built community clouds, building upon user-generated content and user-provided networks towards an ecosystem of cloud services. To address the limitation and enhance utility of community networks, we propose a collaborative distributed architecture for building a community cloud system that employs resources contributed by the members of the community network for provisioning infrastructure and software services. Such architecture needs to be tailored to the specific social, economic and technical characteristics of the community networks for community clouds to be successful and sustainable. By real deployments of clouds in community networks and evaluation of application performance, we show that community clouds are feasible. Our result may encourage collaborative innovative cloud-based services made possible with the resources of a community.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft
Socially Trusted Collaborative Edge Computing in Ultra Dense Networks
Small cell base stations (SBSs) endowed with cloud-like computing
capabilities are considered as a key enabler of edge computing (EC), which
provides ultra-low latency and location-awareness for a variety of emerging
mobile applications and the Internet of Things. However, due to the limited
computation resources of an individual SBS, providing computation services of
high quality to its users faces significant challenges when it is overloaded
with an excessive amount of computation workload. In this paper, we propose
collaborative edge computing among SBSs by forming SBS coalitions to share
computation resources with each other, thereby accommodating more computation
workload in the edge system and reducing reliance on the remote cloud. A novel
SBS coalition formation algorithm is developed based on the coalitional game
theory to cope with various new challenges in small-cell-based edge systems,
including the co-provisioning of radio access and computing services,
cooperation incentives, and potential security risks. To address these
challenges, the proposed method (1) allows collaboration at both the user-SBS
association stage and the SBS peer offloading stage by exploiting the ultra
dense deployment of SBSs, (2) develops a payment-based incentive mechanism that
implements proportionally fair utility division to form stable SBS coalitions,
and (3) builds a social trust network for managing security risks among SBSs
due to collaboration. Systematic simulations in practical scenarios are carried
out to evaluate the efficacy and performance of the proposed method, which
shows that tremendous edge computing performance improvement can be achieved.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1010.4501 by other author
SMEs in Focus : Exploring the experience of micro, small and medium enterprise owners in Malta
Report commissioned by the Ministry for Fair Competition, Small Business and Consumers in 2011. In-depth qualitative interviews were carried out on a purposive sample of business owners (n=31) to explore the relational dynamics at the root of doing business. Analysis focuses on two key intersections across macro/micro dimensions: the interface between the State and the Individual; and also that between the Market and the Individual enterprise.
Key themes: Entrepreneurial motivation; Process of Process of ‘Rationalisation’ and ‘Regulation’; Enterprise owners’ perceived burdens/assets; Influence of family and gender; Collaboration and CompetitionMinistry for Fair Competition, Small Business and Consumerspeer-reviewe
Addressing Colorado's Primary Care Provider Shortage
Outlines projected shortages of physicians, physician assistants, and advance practice nurses in family practice, internal medicine, and pediatrics and potential impact on health, healthcare access, and the economy. Recommends policy interventions
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