Dynamic trust negotiation for decentralised e-health collaborations

In the Internet-age, the geographical boundaries that have previously impinged upon inter-organisational collaborations have become decreasingly important. Of more importance for such collaborations is the notion and subsequent nature of security and trust - this is especially so in open collaborative environments like the Grid where resources can be both made available, subsequently accessed and used by remote users from a multitude of institutions with a variety of different privileges spanning across the collaboration. In this context, the ability to dynamically negotiate and subsequently enforce security policies driven by various levels of inter-organisational trust is essential. Numerous access control solutions exist today to address aspects of inter-organisational security. These include the use of centralised access control lists where all collaborating partners negotiate and agree on privileges required to access shared resources. Other solutions involve delegating aspects of access right management to trusted remote individuals in assigning privileges to their (remote) users. These solutions typically entail negotiations and delegations which are constrained by organisations, people and the static rules they impose. Such constraints often result in a lack of flexibility in what has been agreed; difficulties in reaching agreement, or once established, in subsequently maintaining these agreements. Furthermore, these solutions often reduce the autonomous capacity of collaborating organisations because of the need to satisfy collaborating partners demands. This can result in increased security risks or reducing the granularity of security policies. Underpinning this is the issue of trust. Specifically trust realisation between organisations, between individuals, and/or between entities or systems that are present in multi-domain authorities. Trust negotiation is one approach that allows and supports trust realisation. The thesis introduces a novel model called dynamic trust negotiation (DTN) that supports n-tier negotiation hops for trust realisation in multi-domain collaborative environments with specific focus on e-Health environments. DTN describes how trust pathways can be discovered and subsequently how remote security credentials can be mapped to local security credentials through trust contracts, thereby bridging the gap that makes decentralised security policies difficult to define and enforce. Furthermore, DTN shows how n-tier negotiation hops can limit the disclosure of access control policies and how semantic issues that exist with security attributes in decentralised environments can be reduced. The thesis presents the results from the application of DTN to various clinical trials and the implementation of DTN to Virtual Organisation for Trials of Epidemiological Studies (VOTES). The thesis concludes that DTN can address the issue of realising and establishing trust between systems or agents within the e-Health domain, such as the clinical trials domain

A Survey on Service Composition Middleware in Pervasive Environments

The development of pervasive computing has put the light on a challenging problem: how to dynamically compose services in heterogeneous and highly changing environments? We propose a survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution. With this powerful and simple model we describe the major service composition middleware. Then, a classification of these service composition middleware according to pervasive requirements - interoperability, discoverability, adaptability, context awareness, QoS management, security, spontaneous management, and autonomous management - is given. The classification highlights what has been done and what remains to do to develop the service composition in pervasive environments

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security

An Investigation into Trust & Reputation for Agent-Based Virtual Organisations

Trust is a prevalent concept in human society. In essence, it concerns our reliance on the actions of our peers, and the actions of other entities within our environment. For example, we may rely on our car starting in the morning to get to work on time, and on the actions of our fellow drivers, so that we may get there safely. For similar reasons, trust is becoming increasingly important in computing, as systems, such as the Grid, require computing resources to work together seamlessly, across organisational and geographical boundaries (Foster et al., 2001). In this context, the reliability of resources in one organisation cannot be assumed from the point of view of another. Moreover, certain resources may fail more often than others, and for this reason, we argue that software systems must be able to assess the reliability of different resources, so that they may choose which resources to rely upon. With this in mind, our goal here is to develop a mechanism by which software entities can automatically assess the trustworthiness of a given entity (the trustee). In achieving this goal, we have developed a probabilistic framework for assessing trust based on observations of a trustee's past behaviour. Such observations may be accounted for either when they are made directly by the assessing party (the truster), or by a third party (reputation source). In the latter case, our mechanism can cope with the possibility that third party information is unreliable, either because the sender is lying, or because it has a different world view. In this document, we present our framework, and show how it can be applied to cases in which a trustee's actions are represented as binary events; for example, a trustee may cooperate with the truster, or it may defect. We place our work in context, by showing how it constitutes part of a system for managing coalitions of agents, operating in a grid computing environment. We then give an empirical evaluation of our method, which shows that it outperforms the most similar system in the literature, in many important scenarios

Towards privacy-aware identity management

The overall goal of the PRIME project (Privacy and Identity Management for Europe) is the development of a privacy-enhanced identity management system that allows users to control the release of their personal information. The PRIME architecture includes an Access Control component allowing the enforcement of protection requirements on personal identifiable information (PII). The overall goal of the PRIME project (Privacy and Identity Management for Europe) is the development of a privacy-enhanced identity management system that allows users to control the release of their personal information. The PRIME architecture includes an Access Control component allowing the enforcement of protection requirements on personal identifiable information (PII)

Named Data Networking in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks: State-of-the-Art and Challenges

International audienceInformation-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as one of the future Internet architectures. It is poised to address the challenges faced by today's Internet that include, but not limited to, scalability, addressing, security, and privacy. Furthermore, it also aims at meeting the requirements for new emerging Internet applications. To realize ICN, Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the recent implementations of ICN that provides a suitable communication approach due to its clean slate design and simple communication model. There are a plethora of applications realized through ICN in different domains where data is the focal point of communication. One such domain is Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) realized through Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) where vehicles exchange information and content with each other and with the infrastructure. To date, excellent research results have been yielded in the VANET domain aiming at safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich driving experience. However, due to the dynamic topologies, host-centric model, and ephemeral nature of vehicular communication, various challenges are faced by VANET that hinder the realization of successful vehicular networks and adversely affect the data dissemination, content delivery, and user experiences. To fill these gaps, NDN has been extensively used as underlying communication paradigm for VANET. Inspired by the extensive research results in NDN-based VANET, in this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic review of NDN-driven VANET. More precisely, we investigate the role of NDN in VANET and discuss the feasibility of NDN architecture in VANET environment. Subsequently, we cover in detail, NDN-based naming, routing and forwarding, caching, mobility, and security mechanism for VANET. Furthermore, we discuss the existing standards, solutions, and simulation tools used in NDN-based VANET. Finally, we also identify open challenges and issues faced by NDN-driven VANET and highlight future research directions that should be addressed by the research community