This paper presents our work in the design and development of collaborative platforms to support distributed scientific collaborations in a national biosecurity laboratory which carries out diagnostics and research work in animal diseases. We have focused on two types of collaboration challenges. One is the “distributed” collaborations between scientists working inside the physical containment areas and scientists working in the general office area within the laboratory. The second is the collaborative diagnosis and decision-making work between this laboratory and other organizations working on the responses of emergency animal diseases. The “biosecurity collaboration platform” which addresses the first challenge has been implemented and used by the scientists in the laboratory. The platform integrates shared digital workspaces and supports the sharing and interaction of scientific data from various resources and laboratory instruments (e.g. microscopes). The “secure collaboration platform” which addresses the second challenge is an extension of the biosecurity collaboration platform and integrates eAuthentication and eAuthorization technologies to support secure communication and information sharing between experts from different organizations. Results from user studies have shown that the collaboration platforms can provide core capabilities of communication, trustworthy information sharing and access to real-time data from scientific instruments in complex collaborations in the biosecurity domain.

Establishing secure collaborations between multiple organisations, potentially who are in competitors, requires substantial careful attention to how information is exchanged during the collaboration, from the formulation of policies and agreements between the organisations that govern the collaboration at the most abstract level, through to authentication and authorisation services and down to secure network and storage infrastructure. This paper presents a high level description of the secure integrated collaboration platform for distributed groups that has been developed and deployed as a part of a pilot for the AU2EU project. This secure platform utilises advanced eAuthentication and eAuthorisation services integrated into an advanced real-time collaborative system offering high definition telepresence combined with a secure common shared workspace that gives capability based collaborative access to specialised instruments, data sets and images.

Clouds have the potentials to facilitate resource sharing for collaborations among different organizations or individuals. In this paper, we realise that the identity management scheme in current clouds is not very convenient for users to collaborate over clouds. This inconvenience is caused by the requirement to users who in order to access privately shared resources in clouds must register into the clouds, but might be reluctant to register. To address this inconvenience, we propose a user-controlled identity provisioning mechanism, by which a registered user can create local identities for collaborators to share the resources in his account, and using the local identities, collaborators can access the privately shared resources without being required to register. We demonstrate our mechanism by implementing a prototype. We believe our mechanism can benefit current clouds to improve their sharing services.

The trend towards Cloud computing infrastructure has increased the need for new methods that allow data owners to share their data with others securely taking into account the needs of multiple stakeholders. The data owner should be able to share confidential data while delegating much of the burden of access control management to the Cloud and trusted enterprises. The lack of such methods to enhance privacy and security may hinder the growth of cloud computing. In particular, there is a growing need to better manage security keys of data shared in the Cloud. BYOD provides a first step to enabling secure and efficient key management, however, the data owner cannot guarantee that the data consumers device itself is secure. Furthermore, in current methods the data owner cannot revoke a particular data consumer or group efficiently. In this paper, we address these issues by incorporating a hardware-based Trusted Platform Module (TPM) mechanism called the Trusted Extension Device (TED) together with our security model and protocol to allow stronger privacy of data compared to software-based security protocols. We demonstrate the concept of using TED for stronger protection and management of cryptographic keys and how our secure data sharing protocol will allow a data owner (e.g, author) to securely store data via untrusted Cloud services. Our work prevents keys to be stolen by outsiders and/or dishonest authorised consumers, thus making it particularly attractive to be implemented in a real-world scenario.

We present a specification language Cloud# for modeling the internal organisation of cloud. By reasoning about cloud models, clients understand more on how services are delivered inside cloud. In this sense, cloud models make cloud services more transparent to clients. The transparency of cloud services are expected to increase the confidence of clients to move their business-critical applications to cloud. The expressiveness of Cloud# is evaluated by giving four cloud models, which demonstrate basic features of cloud computing, such as resource virtualization and air scheduling. We describe an application of Cloud# by building an architecture, in which Cloud# models are combined with remote attestation to deliver trusted services.

We present the design and implementation of an advanced collaboration platform that integrates life-size video conferencing and group interactions with a large shared workspace. The platform was developed to support the diagnostics and research scientists who need to work collaboratively with others

In recent years, we witnessed a range of innovations in the 'service' related technologies, such as Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. Along with the Service Oriented Architecture, companies can wrap their technological product as a service, to collaborate with others. Facing the ever-escalating global competition, such collaboration is crucial. The viability of this paradigm highly depends on the compliance and therefore the trustworthiness of all collaborators. However, it is challenging to achieve trustworthiness in such a dynamic cross-domain environment, as each participator may deceit for individual benefits. As a solution, we have proposed to enforce strong accountability to enhance the trustworthiness. With this accountability, incompliance can always be determined in a provable and undeniable way. In this paper, we extend our work by proposing a novel modeling of the collaborative business process. Based on this modeling, we thoroughly analyze the evidence and proving procedure needed for different types of compliance, and evaluate the extent to which those compliance can be indeed proved. We have implemented a demonstrative system to show its effectiveness in real practice.

Current network programming protocols provide an efficient way to update program images running on sensor nodes without having physical access to them. Securing these updates, however, remains a challenging and important issue, given the open environment where sensor nodes are often deployed. Several approaches addressing these issues have been reported, but their use of cryptographically strong protocols means that their computational costs (and hence, power consumption and communication costs) are relatively high. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to secure a multihop network programming protocol through the use of multiple one-way hash chains. The scheme is shown to be lower in computational, power consumption, and communication costs yet still able to secure multihop propagation of program images. We demonstrate the use of this scheme and provide some results using the popular network programming protocol, Deluge. In addition, we include a performance evaluation of our scheme, implemented in TinyOS, in terms of latency and energy consumption.

Web services have been widely accepted as a platform-independent services-oriented technology. On the other hand, ubiquitous technologies are getting popular in a variety of domain applications. In particular, hosting web services from mobile devices became a way of extending knowledge sharing for teaching and learning purposes. This paper presents our design and implementation of a mobile web services framework for syndromic surveillance diagnosis and learning. This framework can assist farmers and veterinary students to study surveillance and diagnosis of farm animal diseases in the field. In this paper, we also present a performance study of hosting web services on mobile devices by evaluating the mobile learning application.

The enormous amount of data generated in daily operations and the increasing demands for data accessibility across organizations are pushing individuals and organizations to outsource their data storage to cloud storage services. However, the security and the privacy of the outsourced data goes beyond the data owners' control. In this paper, we propose a service composition approach to preserve privacy for data stored in untrusted storage service. A virtual file system, called Trust Store, is prototyped to demonstrate this concept. It allows users utilize untrusted storage service provider with confidentiality and integrity of the data preserved. We deployed the prototype with Amazon S3 and evaluate its performance.

We report on our experiences in developing a hardware based security solution for a demonstration prototype of a novel, smart-grid enabled energy services delivery model. This model is based on establishing and maintaining trusted, secure dynamic collaborations with agreed, policy driven usage and b

We propose and implement a cloud architecture of virtual TPMs. In this architecture, TPM instances can be obtained from the TPM cloud on demand. Hence, the TPM functionality is available for applications that do not have TPM chips in their local platforms. Moreover, users can access their keys and data in the same TPM instance even if they move to other platforms. The TPM functionality in cloud is easy to access for applications developed in different languages since cloud computing delivers services in standard protocols. The functionality of the TPM cloud is demonstrated by using it to implement the Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol for web authentication.

The mechanism of establishing trust in a computing platform is tightly coupled with the characteristics of a specific machine. This limits the portability and mobility of trust as demanded by many emerging applications that go beyond the organizational boundaries. In order to address this problem, we propose a trusted computing platform in a form of a USB device. First, we describe the design and implementation of the hardware and software architectures of the device. We then demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed device by developing a trusted application.

Rigorously trusted services depend on reliable evidences to describe and check service behaviors. In this paper, we propose the pi-SOA framework, which delivers mutually trusted services in a rigorous way. The framework allows clients to verify service behaviors remotely according to their trust policies and uniquely identify the verified service at all times during its executions. On the other hand, service providers in this framework can check that clients have agreed with the service behaviors before using the service.

Summary form only given. Accountability in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a capability of making business processes across all participants (services, applications and people) accountable in terms of both business logic and Quality of Services (QoS). While accountability is a critical mechanism to enhance trust between collaborative services, there is the lack of standard accountability support in the current SOA infrastructure. For example, it is difficult with the existing technologies/infrastructure to resolve a dispute between two (web) services if some interactions between the two services go wrong; there is also little existing accountability support for a service consumer to collect quantity evidences to complain a service provider, who fails to meet its Service Level Agreement (SLA). As the increasing real-world activities are performed through the Internet connected services, we envision that there will be growing requirements for making the behaviors of both service providers and consumers accountable. In the business world, one may be reluctant to transact directly with a stranger. But a mutually trusted middleman can be used to facilitate transactions and resolve possible disputes. In this tutorial, we will share our observations and research results on building accountability into SOA. First, we will review related work on accountability in traditional distributed systems, ranging from Internet protocols and network file systems to outsourced database management systems. We will examine what methods embodied in these work can fit service computing in Internet scale and what cannot. Then we will present our research work on middleman-based approach to delivering accountability as a service, including our recent research results. This tutorial will focus on the major technical challenges of enabling SOA accountable and our solutions to these challenges. Finally, we will demonstrate our solutions using a collaborative services scenario deployed in Amazon EC^2 cloud. The goal of this tutorial is to provide detailed understanding of accountability issues and related technologies in SOA with in-depth related work discussions, recent research outcomes and a deployed accountability service prototype.

As growing number of real-world activities are performed through Internet connected services, there are increasing needs to make the behaviors of both service consumer and provider accountable. Many efforts attempting to regulate services and to guarantee service qualities lack sufficient accountability support. This paper treats accountability as a service and proposes a novel contract-based accountability service model to tackle this problem. The model uses federated accountability services to audit interactions between service consumers and service providers so that misbehaviors can be detected with undeniable evidences. We show how Internet data management services can be made accountable using this service model. We implemented the data management service and characterized its performance.

Code dissemination protocols provide a convenient way to update program images via wireless communication. Due to the open environment in which Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are typically deployed, it is important that a code dissemination protocol ensures that a program image update can be authenticated as coming from a trusted source. In some applications it is also required that the data be kept confidential in spite of the possibility of message interception. Authentication and confidentiality are implemented through cryptographic operations which may be expensive in power consumption, making a protocol with these features vulnerable to attack by an adversary who transmits forged data, forcing nodes to waste energy in identifying it as invalid i.e., a signature-based DoS attack). Additionally, in multi-hop dissemination protocols, each sensor node is required to broadcast its program image when requested by its neighbors. An adversary could repeatedly send spurious program image requests to its neighbors, making them exhaust their energy reserves i.e., request-based DoS attack). In this paper, we present a new approach to achieve confidentiality in multi-hop code dissemination. We propose counter-measures against both types of DoS attacks mentioned above. To our knowledge, we are the first to integrate confidentiality and DoS-attack-resistance in a multi-hop code dissemination protocol. Our approach is based on Deluge, an open source, state-of-the-art code dissemination protocol for WSNs. In addition, We provide a performance evaluation in terms of latency and energy consumption in our scheme, compared with the original Deluge and the existing secure Deluge.

Electronic Contract (eContract) has been recognized as a good combination of technical specification and legal documentation for establishing and regulating virtual organizations built for dynamic collaborations. This paper presents a design and implementation of an eContract service with an aim of providing a trusted collaboration platform for collaborators. The implemented service uses Web services technologies to facilitate its collaborators not only to contribute resources in an eContract, but also to negotiate and instantiate them through eContract. This paper describes the interface and protocols for the eContract service. The architecture, interface and protocols designed for the service are demonstrated using an example of providing universal connectivity service for a telepresence application in the context of eResearch domain.

Dynamic collaborations involve contributed resources across the organisational boundaries that are subjected to different set of policies. The management of such resources for dynamic collaborations including negotiation, validation, instantiation and termination is difficult. Existing approaches for collaborations using Web Services such as WSLA are designed to deal with scenarios involving two parties: a service provider and a service consumer. These approaches do not scale well to multiparty nature of dynamic collaborations. To address this problem, we propose a framework for a language called Web Service Collaborative Context Definition Language for dynamic collaborations. The language itself has been defined using XML Schema and has been implemented in a dynamic collaboration platform.

We propose an efficient reliable data collection(eRDC) algorithm. The eRDC is designed for energy-constraint wireless sensor networks (WSN) to balance reliability and energy consumption. We derive energy efficiencies of the proposed reliability schemes, and evaluate their performances. These analyses provide a guideline to determine the number of retransmissions for reliable data delivery. Dynamic programming concept is used to find the optimal solution. We present a distributed eRDC implementation to dynamically control the maximum number of retransmissions based on the guideline provided. Discrete event simulations and field trials with wireless sensor nodes confirmed our results.

Current network programming protocols provide an efficient way to update the program image running on sensor nodes without physical access to them. However, given the open environment in which sensor nodes are deployed, securing network programming is a challenging task. Existing work addressing this issue either lack consideration of securing multi-hop network programming protocols, or are not cost-efficient. To our knowledge, none of them have evaluated the power consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to secure multi-hop network programming protocols using multiple one-way hash chains. This scheme is resilient to malicious program image injection by the compromised nodes and it secures multi-hop propagation of program images for sensor nodes. Based on the most popular network programming protocol, Deluge, an overhead analysis on this schemes is given. In addition, our scheme is implemented in TinyOS and a performance evaluation in terms of latency and energy consumption is presented.

While Web Services Security (WSS) enhances the security of web services, it may also introduce additional performance overheads to standard web services due to additional CPU processing and larger messages transferred. In this paper, we aim at clarifying this concern by conducting a quantitative performance evaluation of WSS overhead. Based on the evaluation, we extend our existing web services performance model by taking the extra WSS overheads into account. The extended performance model is validated on different environments with different messages sizes and WSS security policies.

Dynamic collaborations are the means by which a group of autonomous entities (possibly competing) collaborate to achieve a common objective by sharing resources that may be owned and managed both privately or jointly. Our focus in this paper is on controlling jointly owned shared data that is inherently ephemeral, as it does not exist outside the period of the collaboration. This paper explores the application of the ephemerizer concept as a means to control the access to shared collaboration data. Towards this, we first define a service-oriented architecture Anitya that enables the development of a third party service for managing ephemeral data in dynamic collaborations. We then extend the pair wise secure communication protocol used in the ephemerizer and propose three different multiparty secure group communication protocols for sharing collaboration data under the defined architecture. We also discuss the design, implementation, and evaluation of the architecture and protocols.

This paper first defines a format for capturing and distributing contributed resources called an eContract and then proposes an agreement protocol along with a simple distributed algorithm for negotiating the eContract in the context of dynamic collaborations. The insights gained from the analysis of the proposed negotiation algorithm lead us to the development of an efficient "message piggybacking" negotiation algorithm.

Web services security (WSS) has been approved as a standard by OASIS and widely adopted in the industry as a solution for enhancing the security of Web services. However, the performance of WSS remains a concern due to the additional security contents added to SOAP message and the extra service time for processing these security contents. This paper aims at clarifying this concern by conducting a performance evaluation of WSS. A simple Web service is designed and used for performance testing with a variety of WSS polices and message sizes. The test results are categorized, compared and analyzed to work out the overheads for individual security setting. This work is expected to provide an overview and guidance for WSS performance overhead

While Web services have been widely accepted as a platform-independent services-oriented technology, its performance remains a concern due to the verbosity and inefficiency inherent from using text-based XML. This paper presents a study of Web services performance by evaluating the current implementations of Web services and comparing them with a number of alternative technologies. This study gives a picture of the current Web services performance behaviors and develops a simple performance model that can be used to estimate Web services latencies

The Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA) vision by Helland, P. (2005) is about building large-scale distributed applications by composing coarse-grained autonomous services in a flexible architecture that can adapt to changing business requirements. These services interact by exchanging one-way messages through standardized message processing and transport protocols. This vision is being driven by economic imperatives for integration and automation across administrative and organizational boundaries. This paper presents a concise yet expressive model for service contracts to describe messaging behavior. The idea is simple: we use Boolean conditions to specify when a message can be sent and received, where the conditions refer only to other messages in the service contract - that is, conditions only refer to a service's externalized messaging state and not to internal state

A finite buffer with time constraints on the rate of accepting inputs, producing outputs, and message latency is specified using both Timed CSP and a new real-time specification language, CSP + T, which adds expressive power to some of the sequential aspects of CSP and allows the description of complex event timings from within a single sequential process. On the other hand, Timed CSP encourages event-timing descriptions to be built up in a constraint-oriented manner with the parallel composition of several processes. Although these represent two complementary specification styles, both provide valuable insights into the specification of complex event timings.