Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

A Secure Integrated Framework for Fog-Assisted Internet of Things Systems

Fog-Assisted Internet of Things (Fog-IoT) systems are deployed in remote and unprotected environments, making them vulnerable to security, privacy, and trust challenges. Existing studies propose security schemes and trust models for these systems. However, mitigation of insider attacks, namely blackhole, sinkhole, sybil, collusion, self-promotion, and privilege escalation, has always been a challenge and mostly carried out by the legitimate nodes. Compared to other studies, this paper proposes a framework featuring attribute-based access control and trust-based behavioural monitoring to address the challenges mentioned above. The proposed framework consists of two components, the security component (SC) and the trust management component (TMC). SC ensures data confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and authorization. TMC evaluates Fog-IoT entities’ performance using a trust model based on a set of QoS and network communication features. Subsequently, trust is embedded as an attribute within SC’s access control policies, ensuring that only trusted entities are granted access to fog resources. Several attacking scenarios, namely DoS, DDoS, probing, and data theft are designed to elaborate on how the change in trust triggers the change in access rights and, therefore, validates the proposed integrated framework’s design principles. The framework is evaluated on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B to benchmark its performance in terms of time and memory complexity. Our results show that both SC and TMC are lightweight and suitable for resource-constrained devices

Secure Message Dissemination with QoS Guaranteed Routing in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a variant of vehicular adhoc network (VANET) where vehicles can communicate with other vehicles, infrastructure devices, parking lots and even pedestrians.  Communication to other entities is facilitates through various services like DSRC, C2C-CC. Fake messages can be propagated by attackers for various selfish needs. Complex authentication procedures can affect the propagation of emergency messages. Thus a light weight mechanism to ensure the trust of messages without affecting the delivery deadlines for emergency messages. Addressing this problem, this work proposes a clustering based network topology for IoV where routing is optimized for message dissemination of various classes using hybrid meta-heuristics.  In addition, two stage message authentication technique combining collaborative authentication with Bayesian filtering is proposed to verify the authenticity of message. Through simulation analysis, the proposed solution is found to detect fake messages with an accuracy of 96% with 10% lower processing delay compared to existing works

Digital Hash Data Encryption for IoT Financial Transactions using Blockchain Security in the Cloud

Blockchain security via the Internet of Things (IoT) will reshape the decision-making function of the data-driven incumbent smart enterprise, providing the vision of the connected world of things. Enterprise IoT development of devices, personnel, and systems in such a way that they may connect and communicate with each other through the Internet. Blockchain is an enterprise financial transaction, and its digital network is distributed transaction ledger. Today, enterprises need the massive global data management and rapid trading volume to keep things going and growing. It creates enterprise business challenges of different types of security, transparency, and complexity of the problem. Enterprise architecture offers several advantages for the thief to obtain a specific user account,   application, and access to the device. This is, will doesn't be to provide the necessities of security. The proposed Digital Hash Data Encryption (DHDE) is used to secure the transaction data-based embedded system people and blockchain. Blockchain and IoT technology integration may bring numerous benefits to mention. Therefore, the proposed DHDE algorithm comprehensively discusses the blockchain technology integration system. The proposed DHDE algorithm encrypts the transaction data for an unauthorized person who cannot access the enterprise transaction data based on embedded system people and blockchain

Understanding the Individual and Organizational Attributes of Servant Leadership in Local Governments

Servant leaders are driven by a natural feeling to serve first which manifests into a conscious desire to lead. The servant leadership style emphasizes internalizing ethical behavior, along with empathy and service orientation in creating value for the community which is critical in public administration. While the servant leadership concept has gained much interest among business management scholars, it has received little attention in public administration. This dissertation aims to fill this wide gap in public administrative leadership scholarship by investigating the role of servant leadership in public administration. Specifically, the dissertation seeks to understand individual (servant identity and moral potency) and organizational attributes (organizational social capital and co-production of public service) of servant leadership in local governments. The study is empirically based in Florida, which is a large state with a diverse population and local government characteristics. It uses a mixed-method approach, with complementary quantitative and qualitative analyses. The methods include an online statewide survey of county and city managers and their staff (N=241). The data are analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling. The analysis is complemented with three in-depth case studies of county and city governments to explain how servant leadership manifested. The study holds two key findings. First, servant identity (calling, humility, empathy, and agape love) and moral potency (moral ownership, moral courage, and moral efficacy) attributes are significant predictors of servant leadership behavior among county and city managers. Servant identity correlates with putting the interests of the employees, community, and the organization above their own. The quest for serving others drives servant leaders’ ethical actions. Second, county and city managers who are servant leaders enhance organizational social capital and co-production of public services by encouraging community-centric approaches. They create a service climate that inspires a community-engaged culture. They instill trust among both internal (employees, elected officials) and external organizational stakeholders (nonprofits, community organizations, and citizens) through continuous engagement. Overall, this study shows the significance of servant leadership for public administration and management. It suggests that servant leadership offers advantages over traditional (e.g. transformational and transactional) approaches which are inwardly oriented. Servant leadership goes beyond to serve the community and could be instrumental in strengthening democratic governance

Antecedents of Cloud Computing Adoption in the Malaysian context: A Systematic Literature Review

In a competitive marketplace, the competitiveness and survival of any corporation are often attributed to its ability to adopt innovative technology which bestows a competitive edge and reduced costs, improves the quality and the efficiency of its business processes. Cloud computing is a platform for the development of computational solutions for multiple fields of knowledge, as it offers cost-saving mechanisms and increased efficiency to organisations. Despite its maturity and enhancement, reviews pertaining to antecedents of cloud computing adoption in the Malaysian context are scarce. Thus, a systematic literature review using Scopus database for retrieving the related articles was carried out to shed light on the antecedents of cloud computing adoption in the Malaysian context. The review revealed that the antecedents influencing cloud computing adoption include technological context elements (relative advantages, technological readiness, cost-saving, and compatibility), organisational context elements (top management support), and environmental context elements (competitive pressure, external support/trading partner support/regulatory support, vendor reputation and trust). Understanding the antecedents of cloud computing adoption is crucial towards strengthening cloud computing adoption and, in turn, will improve the performance and competitiveness of corporate sectors. &nbsp

Construction industry 4.0 and sustainability: an enabling framework

Governments worldwide are taking actions to address the construction sector's sustainability concerns, including high carbon emissions, health and safety risks, low productivity, and increasing costs. Applying Industry 4.0 technologies to construction (also referred to as Construction 4.0) could address some of these concerns. However, current understanding about this is quite limited, with previous work being largely fragmented and limited both in terms of technologies as well as their interrelationships with the triple bottom line of sustainability perspectives. The focus of this article is therefore on addressing these gaps by proposing a comprehensive multi-dimensional Construction 4.0 sustainability framework that identifies and categorizes the key Construction 4.0 technologies and their positive and negative impacts on environmental, economic, and social sustainability, and then establishing its applicability/usefulness through an empirical, multimethodology case study assessment of the UAE's construction sector. The findings indicate Construction 4.0’s positive impacts on environmental and economic sustainability that far outweigh its negative effects, although these impacts are comparable with regards to social sustainability. On Construction 4.0 technologies itself, their application was found to be nonuniform with greater application seen for building information modeling and automation vis-à-vis others such as cyber-physical systems and smart materials, with significant growth expected in the future for blockchain- and three-dimensional-printing-related technologies. The proposed novel framework could enable the development of policy interventions and support mechanisms to increase Construction 4.0 deployment while addressing its negative sustainability-related impacts. The framework also has the potential to be adapted and applied to other country and sectoral contexts