A Distributed Context-Aware Trust Management Architecture

The realization of a pervasive context-aware service platform imposes new challenges for the security and privacy aspects of the system in relation to traditional service platforms. One important aspect is related with the management of trust relationships, which is especially hard in a pervasive environment because users are supposed to interact with entities unknown before hand in an ad-hoc and dynamic manner. Current trust management solutions do not adapt nor scale well in this dynamic service provisioning scenario because they require previously defined trust relationships in order to operate. The objective of this thesis is to design, prototype and validate a context-aware distributed trust management architecture in order to address: (a) the lack of integration between available trust solutions and security and privacy management languages, and (b) the dynamic characteristics of a context-aware service platform

Trustworthiness and Quality of Context Information

Context-aware service platforms use context information to customize their services to the current users’ situation. Due to technical limitations in sensors and context reasoning algorithms, context information does not always represent accurately the reality, and Quality of Context (QoC) models have been proposed to quantify this inaccuracy. The problems we have identified with existing QoC models is that they do not follow a standard terminology and none of them clearly differentiate quality attributes related to instances of context information (e.g. accuracy and precision) from trustworthiness, which is a quality attribute related to the context information provider. In this paper we propose a QoC model and management architecture that supports the management of QoC trustworthiness and also contributes to the terminology alignment of existing QoC models.\ud In our QoC model, trustworthiness is a measurement of the reliability of a context information provider to provide context information about a specific entity according to a certain quality level. This trustworthiness value is used in our QoC management architecture to support context-aware service providers in the selection of trustworthy context\ud providers. As a proof of concept to demonstrate the feasibility of our work we show a prototype implementation of our QoC model and management architecture

A Blockchain-based Approach for Data Accountability and Provenance Tracking

The recent approval of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes new data protection requirements on data controllers and processors with respect to the processing of European Union (EU) residents' data. These requirements consist of a single set of rules that have binding legal status and should be enforced in all EU member states. In light of these requirements, we propose in this paper the use of a blockchain-based approach to support data accountability and provenance tracking. Our approach relies on the use of publicly auditable contracts deployed in a blockchain that increase the transparency with respect to the access and usage of data. We identify and discuss three different models for our approach with different granularity and scalability requirements where contracts can be used to encode data usage policies and provenance tracking information in a privacy-friendly way. From these three models we designed, implemented, and evaluated a model where contracts are deployed by data subjects for each data controller, and a model where subjects join contracts deployed by data controllers in case they accept the data handling conditions. Our implementations show in practice the feasibility and limitations of contracts for the purposes identified in this paper

Electronic Soft-Identities (E-Ids) State-of-the-art and Multi-Morphed E-Ids, an Explorative Study

The scientific contribution of this report is twofold: on a side it provide a first, explorative overview of the state of the art in the world of soft-identity management systems, and on the other he present the first outcomes of a research activity aiming at proposing a solution to address trust and privacy protection issues related to identity and personal data provided by citizens in a smart environment. Our proposed solution combines identity management, trust negotiation, and usage control. The concept of identity management allows creation of less privacy sensitive soft identities derived from hard identities with high assurance. Trust negotiation techniques are used during the authentication phase to support the identity establishment process between the entities in the smart city. After the identity is established we use usage control policies to govern the exchange of identity and personal data in a privacy friendly manner.JRC.G.6 - Digital Citizen Securit

Trust and privacy management support for context-aware service platforms

In a context-aware service platform, service providers adapt their services to the current situation of the service users using context information retrieved from context information providers. In such a service provisioning platform, important trust and privacy issues arise, because different entities responsible for different tasks have to collaborate in the provisioning of the services. Context information is privacy sensitive by nature, making the communication and processing of this information a potential privacy threat. The main goal of this thesis is to learn how to support users and providers of context-aware services in managing the trade-off between privacy protection and context-based service adaptation. More and more precise context information retrieved from trustworthy context information providers allows context-aware service provider to adapt their services more reliably. However, more and more precise context information also means a higher risk for the service users in case of a privacy violation

Blockchain in Energy Communities, A proof of concept

This report aims at exploring the use of the distributed ledger paradigm to incentive the participation of the citizen to a truly free, open and interoperable energy market, producing a feasibility study and a first demo testbed, taking also into consideration privacy, cybersecurity and big-data issues of the smart-home in the Energy market context. This study is intended to support point 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 of the DSM (COM(2015)192) and point 2.2 of the Energy Union package (COM(2015)80.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Variáveis Psicológicas e Desempenho Acadêmico: Uma Análise Da Existência de Correlação Canônica

A análise multivariada é um conjunto de técnicas estatísticas que permite a análise e interpretação de conjuntos de dados de natureza quantitativa com grande número de variáveis de forma simplificada. Dentre o rol de técnicas encontra-se a análise de correlação canônica (ACC) que visa estabelecer estrutura de relação entre dois grupos de variáveis por meio de combinações lineares que maximizem a correlação entre ambos. O objetivo deste artigo foi utilizar a técnica de ACC para analisar a correlação entre três variáveis psicológicas e quatro variáveis de desempenho acadêmic