DFANS: A highly efficient strategy for automated trust negotiation

Automated trust negotiation (ATN) is an approach establishing mutual trust between strangers wishing to share resources or conduct business by gradually requesting and disclosing digitally signed credentials. The digital credentials themselves are usually sensitive, so they have corresponding access control policies to control their disclosure. Therefore, an ATN strategy must be adopted to determine the search for a successful negotiation based on the access control policies. Previously proposed negotiation strategies are either not complete, disclosing irrelevant credentials, or not efficient enough. In this paper, we propose a novel ATN strategy, that is, Deterministic Finite Automaton Negotiation Strategy (DFANS). DFANS is complete and ensures that no irrelevant credentials are disclosed during the negotiation. Furthermore, DFANS is highly efficient. In the worst case, its communication complexity is O(n), where n is the total number of credentials requested, and its computational complexity is O(m) when not involving the cyclic dependencies, where m is the total size of the both sides' policies looked up during the negotiation. When cyclic dependencies exist, a reasonable additional cost of running OSBE protocol that is a provably secure and quite efficient scheme will be added to the computational cost of DFANS to guarantee the negotiation success whenever possible.     

一种基于树建模的自动信任协商策略

自动信任协商是跨多安全域的实体间建立信任关系的一种新方法,协商策略规定了协商过程中信任凭证和访问控制策略的披露方式。针对目前的研究中没有区分凭证的敏感度的问题,引入凭证权重的概念,设计了一种基于带权重的树的协商策略,采取局部取优的思想,每次在访问控制策略可选的情况下选取最小权重的凭证进行披露,直至协商成功或失败。经证明,该策略安全、完备且高效。     

一种基于动态规划的自动信任协商策略

动态规划是解决多阶段决策过程最优化的一种数学方法,可将其运用到自动信任协商中。针对目前有关协商策略的研究中没有区分信任凭证的敏感度和格式的问题,引入披露开销的概念,设计了一种新的协商策略。该策略采用动态规划的思想,基于与/或图建模,分解协商过程,自底向上求解最小开销的凭证披露序列。经证明,该策略是可采纳且高效的,能保障协商的安全性和提高协商的效率。     

The role of inter-channel trust transfer in establishing mobile commerce trust

Mobile brokerage services represent an emerging application of mobile commerce in the brokerage industry. Compared with telephone-based trading services and online brokerage services, they have advantages such as ubiquity, convenience, and privacy. However, the number of investors using mobile brokerage services to conduct brokerage transactions is far smaller than those using other trading methods. A plausible reason for this is that investors lack initial trust in mobile brokerage services, which affects their acceptance of them. This research examines trust transfer as a means of establishing initial trust in mobile brokerage services. We analyze how an investor’s trust in the online brokerage services of a brokerage firm affects her cognitive beliefs about the mobile brokerage services of the firm and what other key factors influence the formation of initial trust in mobile brokerage services. We develop and empirically test a theoretical model of trust transfer from the online to the mobile channels. Our results indicate that trust in online brokerage services not only has a direct effect on initial trust but also has an indirect effect through other variables. This study provides useful suggestions and implications for academics and practitioners.     

Increasing trust in mobile commerce through design aesthetics

The growth of mobile commerce (m-commerce) has motivated a better understanding of how trust can be built on a mobile device. Researchers have previously examined design aesthetics (or visual aesthetics) of mobile website and incorporated a hedonic component of enjoyment in m-commerce domain, but the relationship between design aesthetics of mobile website design and customer trust in m-commerce has been rarely investigated. In this study, design aesthetics was enhanced to include a website characteristics component as important to trust development on the mobile Internet. This model was examined through an empirical study involving 200 subjects using structural equation modeling techniques. Our research found that design aesthetics did significantly impact website characteristics component, especially customization, perceived usefulness and ease of use, all of which were ultimately shown to have significant explanatory power in affecting customer trust.     

An ontology-based approach to automated trust negotiation

We propose an ontology-based approach to automated trust negotiation (ATN) to establish a common vocabulary for ATN across heterogeneous domains and show how ontologies can be used to specify and implement ATN systems. The components of the ATN framework are expressed in terms of a shared ontology and ontology inference techniques are used to perform ATN policy compliance checking. On this basis, a semantically relevant negotiation strategy (SRNS) is proposed that ensures the success of a negotiation whenever it is semantically possible. We analyze the properties of SRNS and evaluate the performance of the ontology-based ATN.     

Understanding the evolution of consumer trust in mobile commerce: a longitudinal study

Consumer trust in mobile commerce (m-commerce) is dynamic. However, little research has examined how consumer trust in m-commerce evolves over time. Based on the extended valence theory, the self-perception theory, and the information systems expectation confirmation theory, this study examines a three-stage theoretical model of consumer trust evolution in mobile banking. We focus on the formation mechanisms of a consumer’s decision in the pre-usage stage, the feedback mechanisms of usage behavior in the usage stage, and the evaluation mechanisms in the post-usage stage. By analyzing longitudinal data collected from 332 individuals through two rounds of surveys, we find that pre-use trust has both direct and indirect influences on mobile banking usage behavior. Usage behavior provides significant feedbacks on cognitive or psychological factors, and customers’ evaluations have significant impacts on satisfaction. Satisfaction enhances post-use trust, which in turn affects future usage behavior. We also find that pre-use trust has a long term impact on post-use trust. Together, these results illustrate the dynamic process through which m-commerce consumer trust transforms.     

An information-based exploration strategy for environment mapping with mobile robots

The availability of efficient mapping systems to produce accurate representations of initially unknown environments is recognized as one of the main requirements for autonomous mobile robots. In this paper, we present an efficient mapping system that has been implemented on a mobile robot equipped with a laser range scanner. The system builds geometrical point-based maps of environments employing an information-based exploration strategy that determines the best observation positions by taking into account both the distance travelled and the information gathered. Our exploration strategy, being based on solid mathematical foundations, differs from many ad hoc exploration strategies proposed in literature. We present: (a) the theoretical aspects of the criterion for determining the best observation positions for a robot building a map, (b) the implementation of a mapping system that uses the proposed criterion, and (c) the experimental validation of our approach.     

An economics-based negotiation scheme among mobile devices in mobile grid

In this paper, we propose an economics-based distributed negotiation scheme among mobile devices in mobile grid. In our model, there are energy negotiation and transactions between buyer devices and seller devices. Dynamic allocation of energy resources in mobile grid is performed through online transactions within markets. Mobile devices can be sellers and buyers that use optimization algorithms to maximize predefined utility functions during their transactions. Seller device agents sell the underlying energy resources of the mobile device. Buyer device agent makes buying decisions within the budget constraints to acquire energy resources. An economics-based negotiation algorithm among mobile devices is proposed. The proposed algorithm decomposes mobile grid system optimization problem into a sequence of two sub-problems. In the simulation, the performance evaluation of economics-based negotiation algorithm is evaluated.     

支持移动环境下信任迁移的设计

在SAML2.0规范的基础上提出一种支持移动设备信任迁移的设计,规划出总体体系结构。在此基础上描述了整个系统运作流程,详细分析了潜在的安全性和部署等相关方面的问题,并提出了相应解决办法。     

An outline of a trust model for electronic commerce

A generic model of trust for electronic commerce is presented. The basic components of the model are party trust and control trust. It is argued that an agent's trust in a transaction with another party is a combination of the trust in the other party and the trust in the control mechanisms for the successful performance of the transaction. The generic trust model can be used for the design of trust related value-added services in electronic commerce. To illustrate this design use of the model, two activities in electronic commerce are compared that require trust, namely electronic payment and cross-border electronic trade. It is shown with the model that these two activities actually require two different types of trust, and that complete different services are needed to create these different types of trust.     

An innovative electronic group-buying system for mobile commerce

With the benefits of discount and convenience, the group-buying mechanism has become a popular commerce service. Nevertheless, there exist several drawbacks in current group-buying systems. First, the absence of security consideration may reveal the privacy of involved participants. Moreover, buyers must pay money to the initiator in advance. Without a trusted third party to monitor the purchase, the initiator may vanish after collecting the money. To mitigate the risk of the above weaknesses, we propose a new mechanism introducing a group-buying server to secure and monitor the transaction. Because the server acts as a mediator, it can help the buyer and vender to negotiate with each other through a secure channel. Mutual authentication between the buyer and vender is guaranteed under the BAN logic model. In particular, we employ the Bloom filter and XOR operation to reduce the size of the transaction table and the computational cost. Thus, the new method can be implemented in mobile devices.     

移动环境下基于策略的QoS两级协商机制研究*

为了更好地控制移动性对QoS的影响,本文把基于策略思想应用到移动环境中,对基于策略的QoS两级协商机制进行研究,设计了框架中功能实体的内部结构,给出所用策略的形式。进一步对COPS协议进行扩展,用其作为实体间的协商协议,并模拟了协商过程。三个实体的两级协商机制能根据移动节点位置、路径的不同,动态选择协商级别作出决策。扩展COPS协议进行QoS协商,使移动管理与QoS协商相互独立,可用移动事件触发QoS协商,对QoS路径进行部分恢复和重建。     

云计算中基于SLA的服务可信协商与访问控制策略

针对当前云计算中因服务提供者(SP)的信任保障机制缺失而容易被不可信服务消费者(SC)滥用的现象,提出面向SC实体的服务可信协商及访问控制策略.该策略首先依据系统信任规则来表达服务实体的可信程度,然后通过求解SC实体的直接和间接信任推理空间建立信任证据的举证方法,同时采用服务级别协议(service level agreements,SLA)构建交互双方的协商机制,最后综合信任传递与迭代计算策略,确定服务交互的SLA等级,提供相应级别的服务,从而达到访问控制的目的.理论分析与实验结果表明,该方法虽少量增加了协商的次数,但能较好解决服务被滥用以及利用率不高的问题,为云计算环境下信任协商研究提供一种有效的新方法.     

An efficient scheduling optimization strategy for improving consistency maintenance in edge cloud environment

The development of Internet of Things leads to an increase in edge devices, and the traditional cloud is unable to meet the demands of the low latency of numerous devices in edge area. On the hand, the media delivery requires high-quality solution to meet ever-increasing user demands. The edge cloud paradigm is put forward to address the issues, which facilitates edge devices to acquire resources dynamically and rapidly from nearby places. However, in order to complete as many tasks as possible in a limited time to meet the needs of users, and to complete the consistency maintenance in as short a time as possible, a two-level scheduling optimization scheme in an edge cloud environment is proposed. The first-level scheduling is by using our proposed artificial fish swarm-based job scheduling method, most jobs will be scheduled to edge data centers. If the edge data center does not have enough resource to complete, the job will be scheduled to centralized cloud data center. Subsequently, the job is divided into same-sized tasks. Then, the second-level scheduling, considering balance load of nodes, the edge cloud task scheduling is proposed to decrease completion time, while the centralized cloud task scheduling is presented to reduce total cost. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme performs better in terms of minimizing latency and completion time, and cutting down total cost.

     

An efficient recommender system algorithm using trust data

The Journal of Supercomputing - Smart services are a concept that provides services to the citizens in an efficient manner. The online shopping and recommender system can play an important role for...     

DFA-VMP: An efficient and secure virtual machine placement strategy under cloud environment

The problem of Virtual Machine (VM) placement is critical to the security and efficiency of the cloud infrastructure. Nowadays most research focuses on the influences caused by the deployed VM on the data center load, energy consumption, resource loss, etc. Few works consider the security and privacy issues of the tenant data on the VM. For instance, as the application of virtualization technology, the VM from different tenants may be placed on one physical host. Hence, attackers may steal secrets from other tenants by using the side-channel attack based on the shared physical resources, which will threat the data security of the tenants in the cloud computing. To address the above issues, this paper proposes an efficient and secure VM placement strategy. Firstly, we define the related security and efficiency indices in the cloud computing system. Then, we establish a multi-objective constraint optimization model for the VM placement considering the security and performance of the system, and find resolution towards this model based on the discrete firefly algorithm. The experimental results in OpenStack cloud platform indicates that the above strategy can effectively reduce the possibility of malicious tenants and targeted tenants on the same physical node, and reduce energy consumption and resource loss at the data center.     

An examination of the determinants of customer loyalty in mobile commerce contexts

While the importance of customer loyalty has been recognized in marketing literature for at least three decades, the development and empirical validation of a customer loyalty model in a mobile commerce (m-commerce) context had not been addressed. The purpose of our study was to develop and validate such a customer loyalty model. Based on IS and marketing literature, a comprehensive set of constructs and hypotheses were compiled with a methodology for testing them. A questionnaire was constructed and data were collected from 255 users of m-commerce systems in Taiwan. Structural modeling techniques were then applied to analyze the data. The results indicated that customer loyalty was affected by perceived value, trust, habit, and customer satisfaction, with customer satisfaction playing a crucial intervening role in the relationship of perceived value and trust to loyalty. Based on the findings, its implications and limitations are discussed.     

An efficient server bandwidth costs decreased mechanism towards mobile devices in cloud-assisted P2P-VoD system

Recently, more and more devices with small buffer size such as PDAs or mobile phones are joining in the VoD system, which leads to two major challenges: how to efficiently distribute their bandwidth resources with small buffer size, and how to provide assistant mechanism to make them playback smoothness. In face of this situation and for the purpose of decreasing the server bandwidth costs, we propose a peers’ downloading mechanism called NCDLT to solve above challenges. It contains two algorithms. The first is neighbors and chunks downloading selection (NCS) algorithm and it ensures peers to find neighbors who can provide video data with lower refusal rate. The second is distributed linear taxation algorithm (DLT) and it makes peers with lower capability acquire enough download rate to reduce the request to servers. The simulation results demonstrate that our algorithms can offload the server bandwidth costs and improve the download rate of peers with small buffer size.