Mobile Agent based Multi-layer Security Framework for Cloud Data Centers

JCDC: A blockchain-based framework for secure data storage and circulation in JointCloud

Data Portability: Key to Cloud Portability and Interoperability

This paper proposes a privacy-aware collaborative energy management framework for cloud data centers (CDCs) operating within an electricity market environment. Each CDC's energy agent (CDCEA) minimizes the total CDC's energy cost by optimizing its energy profile in response to dynamic locational marginal prices and the nodal carbon intensity of the power system issued by the independent system operator (ISO), who clears the energy market. CDCEAs integrate the on-site energy resources of CDCs, such as renewable energy and energy storage systems, and leverage the spatiotemporal flexibility of computing workloads through coordination with cloud service providers (CSPs). CSPs manage privacy-preserving workload scheduling and resource allocation by collaborating with associated CDCEAs and with other CSPs, while ensuring quality of service and adherence to service-level agreements. A two-stage optimization model is developed to coordinate decision-making between the ISO and CDCEAs in energy market in the first stage, and to address the coordination of CSPs with associated CDCEAs and other CSPs in the second stage. The proposed two-stage model is solved using a three-nested distributed iterative algorithm that combines privacy-aware hierarchical and peer-to-peer ADMM methods with an analytical target cascading (ATC) approach. The method is validated using a real-world case study in Northern Virginia, USA, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing costs and enhancing sustainability.

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become integral to modern life, enabling people to communicate, share information, and stay connected over vast distances. However, the rising use of OSNs has sparked significant concerns regarding the privacy and security of user data. This paper presents an innovative method for strengthening data privacy and security in cloud-enabled OSNs utilizing an E-ABE system. The proposed solution employs flow graph analysis to verify relationships, ensuring secure user data exchange while offering fine-grained access control. This approach addresses the limitations of existing methods, which often fail to provide comprehensive privacy and security measures. By leveraging cryptographic techniques and secure communication protocols, the E-ABE model allows for the controlled sharing of sensitive information, ensuring that only authorized users can access data. The system's design includes roles for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), Trusted Attribute Authorities (TAAs), and end-users (followers and followees), each contributing to the overall security framework. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing key generation time, data encryption and decryption time, and communication costs while maintaining high levels of authorization accuracy. This research contributes to the field by providing a robust solution for protecting user data in cloud-based OSNs, highlighting its potential for broader application in other domains requiring stringent data privacy and security measures.

Cloud computing is a model for providing online services. These services can be accessed on a pay-per-use basis from anywhere at any time. However, data security in the cloud has become a very big problem. A major concern about data security is the cloud service provider (CSP), which has access to data, which in turn increases user concerns and reduces cloud capacity in many areas such as medical record databases and financial data. The problem of data security mainly affects the use of cloud computing by users and organizations. The current research on data protection has been done in multi-cloud computing so that CSPs do not have direct access to the data. In this paper, a secure and efficient cloud data system is proposed in order to ensure data confidentiality and integrity by encrypting the image using DNA encoding combined with the logistical map and spatial map. The encrypted image is then divided into chunks before being stored in the multi-cloud to ensure the confidentiality of the data. The hash value is calculated using the Message Digest (MD5) algorithm to verify the integrity of the data. The proposed system also supports efficient updating of outsourced data. For the security analysis, many experiments were conducted to ensure the confidentiality and privacy of data in a multi-cloud environment, where files of different sizes were used, and the analysis showed that the proposed system is more secure. On the other hand, conducted several tests to analyse performance with dynamic data support and latency, where the analysis showed that the results are at the required level. Finally, through a comprehensive analysis of security and performance, the proposed system is proven to be more secure in a multi-cloud environment and that the system is highly efficient

Cloud computing has empowered the individual user by providing seemingly unlimited storage space and availability and accessibility of data anytime and anywhere. Cloud service providers are able to maximize data storage space by incorporating data deduplication into cloud storage. Although data deduplication removes data redundancy and data replication, it also introduces major data privacy and security issues for the user. In this paper, a new privacy-preserving framework that addresses this issue is proposed. Our framework uses an efficient deduplication algorithm to divide a given file into smaller units. These units are then encrypted by the user using the combination of a secure hash function and a block encryption algorithm. An index tree of hash values of these units is also generated and encrypted using an asymmetric search encryption scheme by the user. This index tree will enable the cloud service provider to search through the index and return the requested units. We will show that our proposed framework will allow cloud service and storage providers to employ data deduplication techniques without giving them access to either the users' plaintexts or the users' decryption keys.

<span lang="EN-US">Cloud Computing is the ability to improve the utility or train new human resources without investing in new infrastructure, or add capabilities to existence without the latest software licensing. It expanded the capabilities of Information Technology (IT). From the past few years, cloud computing has developed from a good business concept in the best rising sectors of the IT industry. But more information on individuals and companies was put in the cloud, and concerns began to think about how secure the cloud environment was. Despite cloud surrounding structures, enterprise users still do not want to expand their business in the cloud. Security reduces the growth of cloud computing and continues to spread the market with complexity with data privacy and data protection. The security of cloud computing has constantly been an significant aspect of improved quality of service from cloud service providers. Data storage in the cloud has a problem related to data security. However, cloud computing construct many new security challenges which have not been well examine. In order to ensure that the user's data in the cloud is secure, we have proposed an effective mechanism with a distinctive feature of data integrity and privacy. This paper focusing on problems relating to the cloud data storage techniques and security in virtual environment. We recommend a method for providing data storage and security in cloud using public key Cryptosystem, which uses the concept of the modified RSA algorithm to provide better security for the data stored in the cloud. </span>

Cloud Security is still considered one of the main factors inhibiting the diffusion of the Cloud Computing paradigm. Potential Cloud Service Customers (CSCs) do not trust delegating every kind of resources and data to external Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). The problem grows in complexity due to the increasing adoption of complex supply chains: CSPs that offer Sofware-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud services often do not have their own data centers, but just acquire resources and services from other CSPs. This makes ithard, if not impossible, to ascribe the responsibility of a securityincident. A possible solution is the adoption of Security ServiceLevel Agreements (SLAs): CSPs should deliver services withan SLA that details each guarantee offered in terms of security, and CSCs should be able to compare offerings from differentCSPs and verify that SLAs are respected during service lifecycle. This paper shows how it is possible to build up a per-serviceSecurity SLA in a chain of cloud services, proposing asolution based on a security evaluation technique to comparedifferent cloud service supply chains based on their SecuritySLAs.

So far, agent research can be broadly categorized into two areas: intelligent agents and mobile agents. Intelligent agent research has grown from a background of AI, humancomputer interaction, and autonomous systems, while mobile agents research stems from the areas of distributed computing and networked systems. Intelligent agents research addresses intelligent control, planning, domain modeling, user modeling, perception, interagent cooperation, and adaptivity. Intelligent agents can take on many different roles, ranging from representing a human user’s interests to actively collaborating with users and each other. Intelligent agents are being designed to tackle nearly every tedious, non-creative activity that people perform (e.g., Web searches), as well as many more abstract functions (e.g., entertainment). Major issues in intelligent agents research include knowledge representation and communication, architectures for intelligent autonomy, mixed-initiative behavior, collaboration techniques, and learning. Mobile agents address physical communication, agent mobility, tracking and locating mobile agents, security and reliability of agents, etc. Mobile agents are suited for optimizing communication ‐ moving the action towards the source of data ‐ and thereby avoiding the need for huge data transfers. This is beneficial in data-intensive applications such as data mining. Mobility can also improve reliability in certain cases. In the field of electronic commerce, mobile agents naturally reflect the characteristics of buyer and the seller, effectively playing the roles of traveling salesman or broker. They can also be applied for easier software customization, software distribution, and to represent disconnected users. The main issues are in security, providing the infrastructure on the Web (naming, locating, controlling, and messaging) and improving survivability. The biggest challenge for all new agent technology is developing successful applications. For this minitrack, we selected two characteristics of agents that can span the diverging areas of intelligent and mobile agents: mobility and communication. The accepted papers reflect the research issues described in this summary. The minitrack is organized in three sessions. The first session explores the coordination of multiple intelligent agents using dramatically different communication schemes. Andersson and Ygge present an efficient market-based approach to managing very large scale groups of agents engaged in coordination via producer/ consumer transactions. Their CoTree algorithm allows largescale markets to operate efficiently with sparse communication, rapid updates as agent preferences change, and minimal data caching requirements on massively distributed systems. In contrast, Nelson, Penner, and Soken discuss the Interaction Society model of coordination, in which relatively small-scale groups of knowledge-intensive agents collaborate using complex communication about discrete tasking and information requirements. Their model for inter-agent communication and interactions with human users is being applied to build a multi-agent advising system for coordinating military Search and Rescue operations. Finally, Barbuceanu discusses the role of obligations and interdictions in the context of coarse-grain agent interactions. By explicitly capturing social obligations and the costs associated with violating those constraints, he shows how rational agents can achieve coordinated behavior without necessarily sharing goals. The second session addresses Java-based mobile agent systems. The paper by Covaci, Busse and Zhang, describes how a mobile agent system can be used for network management. Their framework is based on existing solutions such as TMN, and can be extended to SNMP.

This paper presents IMAP, a hybrid agent platform composed of several cooperating intelligent agents and mobile agents. IMAP is implemented in Java and Prolog. Java is used to implement the framework of the system, and in particular for supporting the communication between agents and mobility of agent, while Prolog is used to implement both adduction and derivation mechanisms. IMAP intends to independently employ the underlying derivation/adduction and mobility mechanism. In IMAP, intelligent agent and mobile agent can not only fully exploit individual virtue, but also cooperate to perform a task under a uniform platform. Intelligent agents in IMAP are equipped with hypothetical reasoning capabilities, performed by means of adduction: if the knowledge available to an agent is insufficient to solve a query, the agent could adduce new hypotheses. Each intelligent agent can accept queries from mobile agents by means of the interface module, each query is passed to the reasoning module of intelligent agent which performs a derivation and adduction in order to get an answer for mobile agent. IMAP also provides mobile agents a flexible and efficient coordination mechanism and a reliable migration mechanism, and supports persistence of agent state and agent security. Mobile agent's coordination mechanism exploits the advantages of the XML language and Linda-like coordination. This programmable Linda-like coordination mechanism suits the mobility and openness of the Internet application, XML standard for Internet data representation may guarantee a high-degree of interoperability between heterogeneous environments. The design and implementation key technologies of IMAP are described in this paper. An Internet based auction application example shows the suitability and the effectiveness of the IMAP, and its performance evaluation is also made. Finally, some conclusions and remarks are given.

The mobile agent technology is considered to be very useful for ubiquitous environments. But in order to apply the mobile agent concept to ubiquitous devices, the mobile agent platform should be lightweight because the devices in ubiquitous environments have very limited computing resources. Normally, the ubiquitous devices have J2ME CLDC environments. But this environment has very limited functionality and does not support reflection, dynamic class loading, object serialization, and so on. Therefore, it is very hard to develop the mobile agent platform over the standard J2ME CLDC environments. We have developed the lightweight mobile agent platform, called mMAP, for PDAs with J2ME CDC and have developed the proxy platform, called SAP, for the mobile phone with J2ME CLDC/MIDP. SAP manages the proxy agent, called shadow agent, which is created for each mobile agent in the mMAP. The cooperation between the two platforms allows us to control the mobile agents through the mobile phone.

Abstract: Encryption is essential in preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data in light of the growing concerns about data security in cloud computing. Homomorphic encryption promises to enable secure calculations on encrypted data without the need for decryption, particularly for cloud-based operations. To evaluate the effectiveness and applicability of several homomorphic encryption algorithms for safe cloud computing, we compare and contrast them in this research paper. Partially homomorphic encryption (PHE), somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE), and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) are the three basic homomorphic encryption subtypes that we examine. The implications of this study can aid cloud service providers and organizations in selecting the most appropriate homomorphic encryption scheme based on their specific security requirements and performance considerations. The research contributes to the ongoing efforts to enhance data privacy in cloud computing environments, opening new possibilities for secure data processing in an increasingly connected digital world. The exploration of homomorphic encryption schemes in this study opens new avenues for research and development in the field of cryptographic techniques. As technology continues to evolve, so too must our approaches to safeguarding data. This research serves as a catalyst for further innovations in homomorphic encryption algorithms, enabling even more efficient and robust methods for secure data processing in cloud environments and beyond. The insights derived from this research paper not only empower cloud service providers and organizations to make informed decisions about selecting the most appropriate homomorphic encryption scheme but also contribute to the broader mission of fortifying data privacy and security in cloud computing.

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is getting growing interest due to its wide applicability in variety of social, industrial, and commercial mobile applications. Mobile and smart devices can share complex computational operations with Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). It also provides storage, access polices enforcement, and security operations. In many cases, CSP requires services from crowd contributors CC s for data collection, sharing, and mobile application support. It requires trust management for CC s to guard against malicious CC s and ensure security and privacy of data. However, end users or data requesters also demand reliable security solutions for sharing their data or accessing data from unknown CC s. To ensure strong security, mobile devices are not computationally feasible to perform complex cryptographic operations for desired privacy. To resolve these issues, we propose Reputation-aware Trust and Privacy Preservation scheme for MCC. In first phase, we deal with the trust management by utilizing reputation aware selection of CC s and leverage cloud services where CSP maintains trust score for CC s and data requesters. In second phase, we manage privacy preservation by using our proposed Anonymous Secure-shell Ciphertext-policy Attribute Based Encryption (AS-CABE). We have also proposed a hybrid policy tree mechanism for dynamic attribute selection used for security solutions and key management. Next, an anonymous secure shell is maintained between the CC s and the crowd servers to ensure registration after approval from trusted authority. In the similar vein, we propose outsourced encryption and decryption mechanism for mobiles that further utilize encryption and decryption service providers for complex operations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first one to deal with the trust issues of data requester and privacy concerns of CC s and users both at the same time. After that, we have presented the security analysis to analyze AS-CABE against security attacks. Finally, the results are presented that ensure the supremacy of our proposed scheme as compared to counterparts in terms of reputation score, storage, computation, trust, resilience, encryption, and decryption time.

The speed and convenience of the Internet facilitated the development of electronic commerce (e-commerce). E-commerce research and technologies have always drawn the attention of researchers. Among them, the application of mobile agent on e-commerce has drawn much attention in recent years. Mobile agents can roam freely over different execution environments to execute tasks assigned to them. However, a mobile agent may be attacked when it requests services from other servers or when comes in contact with and exchange information with another agents while roaming on the internet. Hence, a mobile agent user may be concerned that his mobile agent could be corrupted or private information tapped and pirated by other agents. To ensure the security of mobile agents in public network environment, this paper proposes a security scheme that is suitable for mobile agents. The scheme includes access control and key management; it is also an improvement on the key management and access control for mobile agent scheme of Volker and Mehrdad. The proposed scheme corrects the drawback in Volker and Mehrdad’s scheme which is the need of a large amount of storage for storing the secret keys. Security and performance analysis of our scheme proves the proposed scheme to be more efficient and secure.KeywordsAccess ControlHash FunctionMobile AgentPublic ParameterAccess Control SchemeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

A mobile agent is a software program which migrates from a site to another site to perform tasks assigned by a user. For the mobile agent system to support agents in various application areas, the issues regarding reliable agent execution, as well as compatibility between two different agent systems or secure agent migration, have been considered. Some of the proposed schemes are either replicating the agents (Hamidi & Mohammadi, 2005) or check-pointing the agents (Park, Byun, Kim, & Yeom, 2002; Pleisch & Schiper, 2001;) For a single agent environment without considering inter-agent communication, the performance of the replication scheme and the check-pointing scheme is compared in Park et al. (2002) and Silva, Batista, and Silva (2000). In the area of mobile agents, only few works can be found relating to fault tolerance. Most of them refer to special agent systems or cover only some special aspects relating to mobile agents, such as the communication subsystem. Nevertheless, most people working with mobile agents consider fault tolerance to be an important issue (Izatt, Chan, & Brecht, 1999; Shiraishi, Enokido, & Takzawa, 2003). Mobile agents are becoming a major trend for designing distributed systems and applications in the last few years and foreseeable future. It can bring benefits such as reduced network load and overcoming of network latency (Chan, Won, & Lyu, 1993). Nevertheless, security is one of the limiting factors of the development of these systems. The main unsolved security problem lies in the possible existence of malicious hosts that can manipulate the execution and data of agents (Defago, Schiper, & Sergent, 1998). Most distributed applications we see today are deploying the client/server paradigm. There are certain problems with the client/server paradigm, such as the requirement of a high network bandwidth, and continuous user-computer interactivity. In view of the deficiencies of the client/server paradigm, the mobile code paradigm has been developed as an alternative approach for distributed application design. In the client/server paradigm, programs cannot move across different machines and must run on the machines they reside on. The mobile code paradigm, on the other hand, allows programs to be transferred among and executed on different computers. By allowing code to move between hosts, programs can interact on the same computer instead of over the network. Therefore, communication cost can be reduced. Besides, mobile agent (Fischer, Lynch, & Paterson, 1983) programs can be designed to work on behalf of users autonomously. This autonomy allows users to delegate their tasks to the mobile agents, and not to stay continuously in front of the computer terminal. The promises of the mobile code paradigm bring about active research in its realization. Most researchers, however, agree that security concerns are a hurdle (Greenberg, Byington, & Harper, 1998). In this article, we investigate these concerns. First, we review some of the foundation materials of the mobile code paradigm. We elaborate Ghezzi and Vigna’s classification of mobile code paradigms (Ghezzi & Vigna, 1997), which is a collection of the remote evaluation, code on demand, and mobile agent approaches. In the next section, we address the current status of mobile code security. The following section presents the model for fault-tolerant mobile agent. In the next section, security issues of the mobile agent are discussed, and we discuss security modeling and evaluation for the mobile agent in the section after. In the following section, simulation results and influence of the size of agent are discussed. We then conclude the article.