Cloud computing services consumers do not have enough reliable information about critical characteristics of their providers, such as performance, security, trust and privacy, compliance with laws and regulations, among others. Our proposal addresses these problems presenting a trust assessment framework that integrates three domains: Governance, Transparency, and Security Information. Our approach is consumer-centric and deals with trust aspects from the end-user's perspective. We use Indicators to communicate the outcomes, which aim to represent the expression of cybersecurity, manageability, and transparency of services under assessment. This paper includes an implementation proposal, prototype, and proof of concept, in which the framework was applied in a real scenario and executed over a long-term (18 months) usage simulation to verify its applicability, sensitivity, and robustness. Our study is intended for use by consumers of cloud computing who seek to know and measure levels of cybersecurity, protection of privacy, transparency of security, and high levels of quality in their services and infrastructure.

A systematic literature review is presented to understand and analyze the state of the art in Blockchain-based solutions applied to the carbon trading context. The main contributions of the work are twofold: i) updated literature review, emphasizing the contributions of each selected work; ii) classification of the papers based on their main contributions and application domains as well as summarizing and discussing challenges and open research issues. Our results reveal the need for research focusing on understanding the use of advanced technology in complex scenarios of trade and management of carbon credits. This work is intended for researchers who aim to develop methods and techniques that make use of Blockchain technology in the realm of carbon trading.

A public service examination is an effective manner of selecting civil and military servants for admission to various sectors of public service. These examinations usually attract well trained personnel by presenting highly competitive and meritocratic selection. Nevertheless, they also attract criminals that offer candidates the possibility of easy and illegitimate admission. Aiming to provide better security and trust in the selection process, we propose a conceptual method that uses data mining and statistical techniques to detect fraud in public service examinations. The method analyzes geographic and biographical data of candidates, scores, and similarity of answers of one candidate to those of other candidates, as well as past information, to compose a comprehensive index of suspicion. When the value of the index is above a certain limit, it indicates a degree of suspicion of an approved candidate, which may call for further investigation.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a valuable tool to store patients' history as well as to promote evidence-based best practices and advances in healthcare. However, these benefits are limited due to problems related to data quality, difficulties in information retrieval, and semantic interoperability issues. We present the BioFrame aiming to standardize and semantically annotate EHR forms. Our proposal is composed of a multi-dimensional conceptual model, an EHR specification process, and a catalog of software tools. We expect to contribute with a framework that enables the efficient real-life application of semantic technologies and EHR standards to healthcare software systems. A case study was carried out on the specification of pediatric oncology nutrition records in a specialized hospital. The results point to the feasibility of BioFrame, as well as limitations, improvements, and challenges regarding the increase of productivity in the specification process.

Information Security is an aggregation of people effort, processes and technology to help organizations at providing confidentiality, integrity and availability in their information assets. Nowadays, almost all technology services are heavily dependent on cloud computing under their various forms of service models. We realize there are weaknesses in cloud services concerning issues of performance, reliability, security, and privacy, among other issues. Cloud services consumers do not have enough information on these issues neither on compliance with laws and regulations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive mapping of works that deal with cloud trust aspects from user perspective. We aim at identifying how users or consumers of Cloud services measure trust on cloud computing services. Our main contributions are: (i) an updated study on the state of the art of cloud trust models; (ii) a taxonomy of characteristics and contributions to cloud trust; (iii) a discussion on works which present hard problems of research on cloud trust models and gaps of contributions in the literature.

Nowadays, military cyber-missions are increasingly complex, demanding specific and critical socio-technical operational resources. We propose a conceptual proposal of a system architecture aimed at supporting complex operations of cyber-missions. The architecture allows the systematic selecting and prioritizing socio-technical resources for cyber-missions in a systematic manner. The foundations of the proposed architecture are based on a mission operations ontology; it was developed for formalizing the main concepts. The main contributions of the work are: (i) Conceptual Architecture to supporting complex cyber-mission operations; (ii) Lightweight ontology to make explicit its main concepts; and, (iii) an Application Scenario of the system architecture. Our proposal is meant to be useful for researchers, developers and actuators who deal with socio-technical systems in cyber-mission operations.

Information security is a critical issue in the context of complex and interconnected nowadays IT Systems. Innovative testing approaches are demanded to verify whether the main security characteristics are provided in the systems. The conceptual formalization level required by security test processes can be supplied by semantic technologies. STEP-ONE is the Security TEst Process supported by ONtology Environment; its foundations come from largely accepted testing processes and security testing standards. The STPO (Security Testing Process Ontology) formalizes and makes explicit the main concepts of the domain. We present a conceptual characterization of STEP-ONE and describe a usage scenario to illustrate how the proposal can be applied. The main contributions are the conceptual process and the ontology. Our proposal is meant to be applied for the evaluation of IT systems with respect to security characteristics as well as to make systematic the security testing activities.