Trust Management Model for Cloud Computing Environment

Software as a service or (SaaS) is a new software development and deployment paradigm over the cloud and offers Information Technology services dynamically as "on-demand" basis over the internet. Trust is one of the fundamental security concepts on storing and delivering such services. In general, trust factors are integrated into such existent security frameworks in order to add a security level to entities collaborations through the trust relationship. However, deploying trust factor in the secured cloud environment are more complex engineering task due to the existence of heterogeneous types of service providers and consumers. In this paper, a formal trust management model has been introduced to manage the trust and its properties for SaaS in cloud computing environment. The model is capable to represent the direct trust, recommended trust, reputation etc. formally. For the analysis of the trust properties in the cloud environment, the proposed approach estimates the trust value and uncertainty of each peer by computing decay function, number of positive interactions, reputation factor and satisfaction level for the collected information.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 Figures, Conferenc

A supplier selection strategy within the Malaysian telecommunications industry

The telecommunication industry in Malaysia has grown rapidly over the last 15 years, with effective supply chain management becoming increasing important within the sector. A multitude of providers and part owned Malaysian government companies, vendors and suppliers are involved in generating and creating value-adding products and services within this sector (across wireless, wireline, broadband business and consumer lines of business). This paper describes key challenges facing a major telecoms service provider in Malaysia with regards to drivers involved in the overall procurement and supplier selection with regards to components of performance management, decision-making, selection techniques, quality and cost management, procurement policy and procurement ethics. This paper further focuses on defining and detailing research currently being undertaken to develop a framework for identifying supplier selection drivers that are inherent within the sector and suggests a research approach to investigate and develop strategies for supplier selection for the telecommunications industry in Malaysia

MARKETING STUDY REGARDING THE ROMANIAN MOBILE TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES’ OFFER

The fight of the mobile telecommunication companies to attract clients trends to be much more powerful, because the numbers portability has become a reality. The very competitive market goes to the growth of the price importance in choosing an operator. The short term gain of the operators becomes a long term image risk. The choice of some mobile telephony services is sometimes difficult to be made because of the offer’s complexity. The young people represent an important segment in the current or potential mobile telecommunication companies’ clients. This segment is a great consumer of mobile telecommunication services, being, at the same time, a segment that demands varied services at the smallest prices. The clients expect the service to function, to be simple and easy to use, benefit from rapid and efficient assistance if errors occur, and the operator to respect the contract’s riders. This paper will present an analysis of a study regarding the consumption behavior of the young people from the city of Craiova, users of mobile telephony services. The survey subjects are the youngsters (men and women) between 20 and 29 years old. The chosen method of sampling is the quotation method, using selection criteria such as the age and sex.mobile telecommunication, market, offer, consumers’ behavior, price, marketing survey

SecMon: End-to-End Quality and Security Monitoring System

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming a more available and popular way of communicating for Internet users. This also applies to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and merging these two have already proven to be successful (e.g. Skype). Even the existing standards of VoIP provide an assurance of security and Quality of Service (QoS), however, these features are usually optional and supported by limited number of implementations. As a result, the lack of mandatory and widely applicable QoS and security guaranties makes the contemporary VoIP systems vulnerable to attacks and network disturbances. In this paper we are facing these issues and propose the SecMon system, which simultaneously provides a lightweight security mechanism and improves quality parameters of the call. SecMon is intended specially for VoIP service over P2P networks and its main advantage is that it provides authentication, data integrity services, adaptive QoS and (D)DoS attack detection. Moreover, the SecMon approach represents a low-bandwidth consumption solution that is transparent to the users and possesses a self-organizing capability. The above-mentioned features are accomplished mainly by utilizing two information hiding techniques: digital audio watermarking and network steganography. These techniques are used to create covert channels that serve as transport channels for lightweight QoS measurement's results. Furthermore, these metrics are aggregated in a reputation system that enables best route path selection in the P2P network. The reputation system helps also to mitigate (D)DoS attacks, maximize performance and increase transmission efficiency in the network.Comment: Paper was presented at 7th international conference IBIZA 2008: On Computer Science - Research And Applications, Poland, Kazimierz Dolny 31.01-2.02 2008; 14 pages, 5 figure

Practical Attacks Against Graph-based Clustering

Graph modeling allows numerous security problems to be tackled in a general way, however, little work has been done to understand their ability to withstand adversarial attacks. We design and evaluate two novel graph attacks against a state-of-the-art network-level, graph-based detection system. Our work highlights areas in adversarial machine learning that have not yet been addressed, specifically: graph-based clustering techniques, and a global feature space where realistic attackers without perfect knowledge must be accounted for (by the defenders) in order to be practical. Even though less informed attackers can evade graph clustering with low cost, we show that some practical defenses are possible.Comment: ACM CCS 201

The effects of qos level degradation cost on provider selection and task allocation model in telecommunication networks

Firms acquire network capacity from multiple suppliers which offer different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. After acquisition, day-to-day operations such as video conferencing, voice over IP and data applications are allocated between these acquired capacities by considering QoS requirement of each operation. In optimal allocation scheme, it is generally assumed each operation has to be placed into resource that provides equal or higher QoS Level. Conversely, in this study it is showed that former allocation strategy may lead to suboptimal solutions depending upon penalty cost policy to charge degradation in QoS requirements. We model a cost minimization problem which includes three cost components namely capacity acquisition, opportunity and penalty due to loss in QoS

A Conceptual Framework for Definition of the Correlation Between Company Size Categories and the Proliferation of Business Information Systems in Hungary Download article

Based on a conceptual model, this paper aims to explore the background of the decision-making process leading to the introduction of business information systems among enterprises in Hungary. Together with presenting the problems arising in the course of the implementation of such systems, their usage patterns are also investigated. A strong correlation is established between the size of an enterprise, the scope of its business activities and the range of the business information systems it applies