A Reputation and Knowledge Based Trust Service Platform for Trustworthy Social Internet of Things

The Internet of Things has attracted a plenty of research in this decade and imposed fascinating services where large numbers of heterogeneous-features entities socially collaborate together to solve complex scenarios. However, these entities need to trust each other prior to exchanging data or offering services. In this paper, we briefly present our ongoing project called Trust Service Platform, which offers trust assessment of any two entities in the Social Internet of Things to applications and services. We propose a trust model that incorporates both reputation properties as Recommendation and Reputation trust metrics; and knowledge-based property as Knowledge trust metric. For the trust service platform deployment, we propose a reputation system and a functional architecture with Trust Agent, Trust Broker and Trust Analysis and Management modules along with mechanisms and algorithms to deal with the three trust metrics. We also present a utility theory-based mechanism for trust calculation. To clarify our trust service platform, we describe the trust models and mechanisms in accordance with a trust car-sharing service. We believe this study offers the better understanding of the trust as a service in the platform and will impose many trust-related research challenges as the future work

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

A New Trust Framework for E-Government in Cloud of Things

The concept of Cloud of Things becomes important for each e-government, facilitating its way of work, increasing its productivity and all that leading to cost savings. It will likely have a significant impact on the e-governments in the future. E-government diversity goals face many challenges. Trust is a major challenge when deploying Cloud of Things in e-government. In this paper, a new trust framework is proposed that supports trust between Internet of Things devices interconnected to the Cloud in order to support e-government services to be delivered in trusted manner. The proposed framework has been applied to a use case study to ensure the trustworthiness of the proposed framework in a real mission. The results show that the proposed trust framework is useful to ensuring a trust environment for Cloud of Things in order to continue providing and gathering data needed to provide services to users through the E-government services

Confidential remote computing

Since their market launch in late 2015, trusted hardware enclaves have revolutionised the computing world with data-in-use protections. Their security features of confidentiality, integrity and attestation attract many application developers to move their valuable assets, such as cryptographic keys, password managers, private data, secret algorithms and mission-critical operations, into them. The potential security issues have not been well explored yet, and the quick integration movement into these widely available hardware technologies has created emerging problems. Today system and application designers utilise enclave-based protections for critical assets; however, the gap within the area of hardware-software co-design causes these applications to fail to benefit from strong hardware features. This research presents hands-on experiences, techniques and models on the correct utilisation of hardware enclaves in real-world systems. We begin with designing a generic template for scalable many-party applications processing private data with mutually agreed public code. Many-party applications can vary from smart-grid systems to electronic voting infrastructures and block-chain smart contracts to internet-of-things deployments. Next, our research extensively examines private algorithms executing inside trusted hardware enclaves. We present practical use cases for protecting intellectual property, valuable algorithms and business or game logic besides private data. Our mechanisms allow querying private algorithms on rental services, querying private data with privacy filters such as differential privacy budgets, and integrity-protected computing power as a service. These experiences lead us to consolidate the disparate research into a unified Confidential Remote Computing (CRC) model. CRC consists of three main areas: the trusted hardware, the software development and the attestation domains. It resolves the ambiguity of trust in relevant fields and provides a systematic view of the field from past to future. Lastly, we examine the questions and misconceptions about malicious software profiting from security features offered by the hardware. The more popular idea of confidential computing focuses on servers managed by major technology vendors and cloud infrastructures. In contrast, CRC focuses on practices in a more decentralised setting for end-users, system designers and developers

Dynamics of Blockchain Implementation - A Case Study from the Energy Sector

This case study analyzes the impact of theory-based factors on the implementation of different blockchain technologies in use cases from the energy sector. We construct an integrated research model based on the Diffusion of Innovations theory, institutional economics and the Technology-Organization-Environment framework. Using qualitative data from in-depth interviews, we link constructs to theory and assess their impact on each use case. Doing so we can depict the dynamic relations between different blockchain technologies and the energy sector. The study provides insights for decision makers in electric utilities, and government administrations

The Pudding of Trust

Trust - "reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing" - is pervasive in social systems. We constantly apply it in interactions between people, organizations, animals, and even artifacts. We use it instinctively and implicitly in closed and static systems, or consciously and explicitly in open or dynamic systems. An epitome for the former case is a small village, where everybody knows everybody, and the villagers instinctively use their knowledge or stereotypes to trust or distrust their neighbors. A big city exemplifies the latter case, where people use explicit rules of behavior in diverse trust relationships. We already use trust in computing systems extensively, although usually subconsciously. The challenge for exploiting trust in computing lies in extending the use of trust-based solutions, first to artificial entities such as software agents or subsystems, then to human users' subconscious choices