The adoption of Precision Farming (PF) practices involving ubiquitous computing advancements and conceptual innovations of “smart” agricultural production toward Agriculture 4.0 is a significant factor for the benefit of sustainable growth. In this context, the dynamic integration of PF facility systems into the Internet of Things (IoT) represents an excessive challenge considering the large amount of heterogeneous raw data acquired in agricultural environments by Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs). This paper focuses on the issue of facilitating the management, process, and exchange of the numerous and diverse data points generated in multiple PF environments by introducing a framework of a cloud-based context-aware middleware solution as part of a responsive, adaptive, and service-oriented IoT integrated system. More particularly, the paper presents in detail a layered hierarchical structure according to which all functional elements of the system cope with context, while the context awareness operation is accomplished into a cloud-based distributed middleware component that is the core of the entire system acting as a Decision Support System (DSS). Furthermore, as proof of concept, the functionality of the proposed system is studied in real conditions where some evaluation results regarding its performance are quoted.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/3/813/pdf

A Context-Aware Middleware Cloud Approach for Integrating Precision Farming Facilities into the IoT toward Agriculture 4.0

Providing an identity solution is essential for a reliable blockchain-based land registry system. A secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient identity solution is essential but challenging. This paper examines the current literature and provides a systematic literature review in three stages based on the three research questions (RQ) that show the assessment and interpretation process step by step. Based on the parameters and RQ specified in the research methodology section, a total of 43 primary articles have been selected from the 251 articles extracted from various scientific databases. The majority of these articles are concerned with evaluating the existing self-sovereign identity (SSI) solutions and their role in the blockchain-based land registry system to address the compliance issues in the existing SSI solutions with SSI principles and find the best possible SSI solution to address the identity problems in the land registry. The existing digital identity solutions cannot handle the requirements of the identity principle and are prone to various limitations like centralization and dependency on third parties that further augment the chance of security threats. SSI has been designed to overcome these limitations and provide a secure, reliable, and efficient identity solution that gives complete control to the users over their personal identity information (PII). This paper reviews the existing SSI solutions, evaluates them based on the SSI principles, and comes up with the best possible SSI solution for a blockchain-based land registry system. It further provides a detailed investigation of each SSI solution to present its functionalities and limitations for further improvement.

/pdf/self-sovereign-identity-solution-for-blockchain-based-land-1ce18dxe.pdf

Self-Sovereign Identity Solution for Blockchain-Based Land Registry System: A Comparison

Recent technological advances such as the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing, cloud applications lead to exponential growth in the amount of generated data. Indeed, cloud storage services have experienced unprecedented usage demand. The loss of user control over their cloud stored data introduced several security and privacy concerns. To address these concerns, cryptographic techniques are widely adopted at the user side. Attribute based cryptography is commonly used to provide encrypted and / or authenticated access to outsourced data in remote servers. However, the use of these cryptographic mechanisms often increase the storage and computation costs; consequently, the energy consumption in the entire cloud ecosystem. In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of different attribute based cryptographic mechanisms suitable for cloud data sharing services. We also provide a detailed discussion of different reviewed schemes, w.r.t . supported features, namely security, privacy and functional requirements. In addition, we explore the limitations of existing attribute based cryptographic mechanisms and propose future research directions to better fit the growing needs of this cloud environment in terms of energy - savings, processing and storage efficiency and availability requirements.

/pdf/analysis-of-attribute-based-cryptographic-techniques-and-n02wrkt4uq.pdf

Analysis of attribute‐based cryptographic techniques and their application to protect cloud services

Emerging Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) technologies offer a new world of promise by leveraging the quality of mobile services. With MCC, resource-constrained mobile devices could capitalize on the computation/storage resources of cloud servers via communication networks. While MCC adoption is growing significantly, several challenges need to be addressed to make MCC-based solutions scale and meet the ever-growing demand for more resource intensive applications. Security is a critical problem hindering the adoption of MCC. One of the most important aspects of MCC security is to establish authenticated communication sessions between mobile devices and cloud servers. The huge amount of data stored on mobile devices poses information security risks and privacy concerns for individuals, enterprises, and governments. The ability to establish authenticated communication sessions between mobile devices and cloud servers can resolve many security concerns. Limited computing and energy resources on mobile devices makes authentication and encryption a challenging task. In this paper, an overview of MCC authentication protocols is presented. Then, a Dual-Factor Authentication Protocol for MCC devices (D-FAP) is proposed. D-FAP aims at increasing authentication security by using multi-factors while offloading computation to the cloud to reduce battery consumption. The security of the protocol is formally verified and informal analysis is performed for various attacks. The results prove that the D-FAP is successful in mitigating various outsider and insider attacks.

D-FAP: Dual-Factor Authentication Protocol for Mobile Cloud Connected Devices

Digital twin is regarded as a potential solution to optimize positive energy districts (PED). This paper presents a compact review about digital twins for PED from aspects of concepts, working principles, tools/platform and applications, in order to address the issues of both ‘how digital PED twin is made’ and ‘what tools can be used for digital PED twin’. Four key components of digital PED twin are identified, e.g. virtual model, sensor network integration, data analytics and stakeholder layer. Very few available tools now have full functions for digital PED twin, while most tools either have a focus on industrial applications or are designed for data collection, communication and visualization based on building information models (BIM) or geographical information system (GIS). Several observations are gained from successful application that current digital PED twins can be categorized into three tiers: (1) an enhanced version of BIM model only, (2) semantic platforms for data flow, and (3) big data analysis and feedback operation. Further challenges and opportunities are found in areas of data analysis and semantic interoperability, business models, data security and management. The outcome of the review is expected to provide useful information for further development of digital PED twin and optimizing its sustainability.

/pdf/digital-twin-for-accelerating-sustainability-in-positive-53hex0beju.pdf

Digital Twin for Accelerating Sustainability in Positive Energy District: A Review of Simulation Tools and Applications

Cloud computing is often referred to as the technology of the decade. Current Cloud systems present critical limitations to protecting users' data confidentiality. This survey presents a review of the three essential data security attributes in the context of Cloud computing, namely, availability, integrity and confidentiality. It explores numerous research efforts to enhance the security and privacy of data in the Cloud with a focus on maintaining data confidentiality. Recent solutions are critically analysed, and their advantages and limitations are discussed. The paper finishes with a discussion on the future research opportunities and challenges on data confidentiality in the Cloud.

/pdf/a-survey-on-data-confidentiality-and-privacy-in-cloud-4t4z0qma91.pdf

Afnan Aloraini

Papers

A Survey on Data Confidentiality and Privacy in Cloud Computing