Trust in social machines: the challenges

The World Wide Web has ushered in a new generation of applications constructively linking people and computers to create what have been called ‘social machines.’ The ‘components’ of these machines are people and technologies. It has long been recognised that for people to participate in social machines, they have to trust the processes. However, the notions of trust often used tend to be imported from agent-based computing, and may be too formal, objective and selective to describe human trust accurately. This paper applies a theory of human trust to social machines research, and sets out some of the challenges to system designers

Trustee: Full Privacy Preserving Vickrey Auction on top of Ethereum

The wide deployment of tokens for digital assets on top of Ethereum implies the need for powerful trading platforms. Vickrey auctions have been known to determine the real market price of items as bidders are motivated to submit their own monetary valuations without leaking their information to the competitors. Recent constructions have utilized various cryptographic protocols such as ZKP and MPC, however, these approaches either are partially privacy-preserving or require complex computations with several rounds. In this paper, we overcome these limits by presenting Trustee as a Vickrey auction on Ethereum which fully preserves bids' privacy at relatively much lower fees. Trustee consists of three components: a front-end smart contract deployed on Ethereum, an Intel SGX enclave, and a relay to redirect messages between them. Initially, the enclave generates an Ethereum account and ECDH key-pair. Subsequently, the relay publishes the account's address and ECDH public key on the smart contract. As a prerequisite, bidders are encouraged to verify the authenticity and security of Trustee by using the SGX remote attestation service. To participate in the auction, bidders utilize the ECDH public key to encrypt their bids and submit them to the smart contract. Once the bidding interval is closed, the relay retrieves the encrypted bids and feeds them to the enclave that autonomously generates a signed transaction indicating the auction winner. Finally, the relay submits the transaction to the smart contract which verifies the transaction's authenticity and the parameters' consistency before accepting the claimed auction winner. As part of our contributions, we have made a prototype for Trustee available on Github for the community to review and inspect it. Additionally, we analyze the security features of Trustee and report on the transactions' gas cost incurred on Trustee smart contract.Comment: Presented at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2019, 3rd Workshop on Trusted Smart Contract

Personal Data Management Systems: The security and functionality standpoint

International audienceRiding the wave of smart disclosure initiatives and new privacy-protection regulations, the Personal Cloud paradigm is emerging through a myriad of solutions offered to users to let them gather and manage their whole digital life. On the bright side, this opens the way to novel value-added services when crossing multiple sources of data of a given person or crossing the data of multiple people. Yet this paradigm shift towards user empowerment raises fundamental questions with regards to the appropriateness of the functionalities and the data management and protection techniques which are offered by existing solutions to laymen users. These questions must be answered in order to limit the risk of seeing such solutions adopted only by a handful of users and thus leaving the Personal Cloud paradigm to become no more than one of the latest missed attempts to achieve a better regulation of the management of personal data. To this end, we review, compare and analyze personal cloud alternatives in terms of the functionalities they provide and the threat models they target. From this analysis, we derive a general set of functionality and security requirements that any Personal Data Management System (PDMS) should consider. We then identify the challenges of implementing such a PDMS and propose a preliminary design for an extensive and secure PDMS reference architecture satisfying the considered requirements. Finally, we discuss several important research challenges remaining to be addressed to achieve a mature PDMS ecosystem

Provenance-based trust for grid computing: Position Paper

Current evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services, ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systems interacting with one another to perform tasks. Grid systems (and Web Services) are exemplary in this respect and are perhaps some of the first large-scale open computing systems to see widespread use - making them an important testing ground for problems in trust management which are likely to arise. From this perspective, today's grid architectures suffer from limitations, such as lack of a mechanism to trace results and lack of infrastructure to build up trust networks. These are important concerns in open grids, in which "community resources" are owned and managed by multiple stakeholders, and are dynamically organised in virtual organisations. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual services and the aggregation of services that produced such a particular output. Against this background, we present a research agenda to design, conceive and implement an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems. We motivate its use with three complex grid applications, namely aerospace engineering, organ transplant management and bioinformatics. Industrial-strength provenance support includes a scalable and secure architecture, an open proposal for standardising the protocols and data structures, a set of tools for configuring and using the provenance architecture, an open source reference implementation, and a deployment and validation in industrial context. The provision of such facilities will enrich grid capabilities by including new functionalities required for solving complex problems such as provenance data to provide complete audit trails of process execution and third-party analysis and auditing. As a result, we anticipate that a larger uptake of grid technology is likely to occur, since unprecedented possibilities will be offered to users and will give them a competitive edge

Agent-Based Cloud Resource Management for Secure Cloud Infrastructures

The cloud offers clear benefits for computations as well as for storage for diverse application areas. Security concerns are by far the greatest barriers to the wider uptake of cloud computing, particularly for privacy-sensitive applications. The aim of this article is to propose an approach for establishing trust between users and providers of cloud infrastructures (IaaS model) based on certified trusted agents. Such approach would remove barriers that prevent security sensitive applications being moved to the cloud. The core technology encompasses a secure agent platform for providing the execution environment for agents and the secure attested software base which ensures the integrity of the host platform. In this article we describe the motivation, concept, design and initial implementation of these technologies

Virtual HSM: Building a Hardware-backed Dependable Cryptographic Store

Cloud computing is being used by almost everyone, from regular consumer to IT specialists, as it is a way to have high availability, geo-replication, and resource elasticity with pay-as-you-go charging models. Another benefit is the minimal management effort and maintenance expenses for its users. However, security is still pointed out as the main reason hindering the full adoption of cloud services. Consumers lose ownership of their data as soon as it goes to the cloud; therefore, they have to rely on cloud provider’s security assumptions and Service Level Agreements regarding privacy and integrity guarantees for their data. Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) are dedicated cryptographic processors, typically used in secure cloud applications, that are designed specifically for the protection of cryptographic keys in all steps of their life cycles. They are physical devices with tamperproof resistance, but rather expensive. There have been some attempts to virtualize HSMs. Virtual solutions can reduce its costs but without much success as performance is incomparable and security guarantees are hard to achieve in software implementations. In this dissertation, we aim at developing a virtualized HSM supported by modern attestation-based trusted hardware in commodity CPUs to ensure privacy and reliability, which are the main requirements of an HSM. High availability will also be achieved through techniques such as cloud-of-clouds replication on top of those nodes. Therefore virtual HSMs, on the cloud, backed with trusted hardware, seem increasingly promising as security, attestation, and high availability will be guaranteed by our solution, and it would be much cheaper and as reliable as having physical HSMs