According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

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A Break in the Clouds: Towards a Cloud Definition

Recently, indoor positioning systems (IPSs) have been designed to provide location information of persons and devices. The position information enables location-based protocols for user applications. Personal networks (PNs) are designed to meet the users' needs and interconnect users' devices equipped with different communications technologies in various places to form one network. Location-aware services need to be developed in PNs to offer flexible and adaptive personal services and improve the quality of lives. This paper gives a comprehensive survey of numerous IPSs, which include both commercial products and research-oriented solutions. Evaluation criteria are proposed for assessing these systems, namely security and privacy, cost, performance, robustness, complexity, user preferences, commercial availability, and limitations.We compare the existing IPSs and outline the trade-offs among these systems from the viewpoint of a user in a PN.

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A survey of indoor positioning systems for wireless personal networks

The advances in location-acquisition and mobile computing techniques have generated massive spatial trajectory data, which represent the mobility of a diversity of moving objects, such as people, vehicles, and animals. Many techniques have been proposed for processing, managing, and mining trajectory data in the past decade, fostering a broad range of applications. In this article, we conduct a systematic survey on the major research into trajectory data mining, providing a panorama of the field as well as the scope of its research topics. Following a road map from the derivation of trajectory data, to trajectory data preprocessing, to trajectory data management, and to a variety of mining tasks (such as trajectory pattern mining, outlier detection, and trajectory classification), the survey explores the connections, correlations, and differences among these existing techniques. This survey also introduces the methods that transform trajectories into other data formats, such as graphs, matrices, and tensors, to which more data mining and machine learning techniques can be applied. Finally, some public trajectory datasets are presented. This survey can help shape the field of trajectory data mining, providing a quick understanding of this field to the community.

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Trajectory Data Mining: An Overview

This paper tackles a major privacy concern in current location-based services where users have to continuously report their locations to the database server in order to obtain the service. For example, a user asking about the nearest gas station has to report her exact location. With untrusted servers, reporting the location information may lead to several privacy threats. In this paper, we present Casper1; a new framework in which mobile and stationary users can entertain location-based services without revealing their location information. Casper consists of two main components, the location anonymizer and the privacy-aware query processor. The location anonymizer blurs the users' exact location information into cloaked spatial regions based on user-specified privacy requirements. The privacy-aware query processor is embedded inside the location-based database server in order to deal with the cloaked spatial areas rather than the exact location information. Experimental results show that Casper achieves high quality location-based services while providing anonymity for both data and queries.

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The new Casper: query processing for location services without compromising privacy

Recent technological advances have made it feasible to measure and track the location of users, vehicles, and practically any mobile object. Positioning and tracking systems are then collecting a huge amount of potentially sensitive location information, which is a set of data describing a user’s location over a period of time. Since the activities of a user are often related to the locations where such activities are performed, it is natural for users to demand privacy, that is, to require control over the access to their location information. In this chapter, we focus on the privacy aspects of using location information in location-based services (LBSs). LBSs are services that take the current position of the user into consideration when performing their tasks. These services can be accessed from mobile phones, PDA, and any other mobile device. We start the chapter by characterizing the location privacy protection problem and introducing a classification of the main techniques that have been proposed to protect the location privacy. We also survey and discuss recent proposals and ongoing work in the location-based systems area.

Location privacy in pervasive computing

The widespread adoption of mobile communication devices combined with technical improvements of location technologies are fostering the development of a new wave of applications that manage physical positions of individuals to offer location-based services for business, social or informational purposes. As an effect of such innovative services, however, privacy concerns are increasing, calling for more sophisticated solutions for providing users with different and manageable levels of privacy. In this work, we propose a way to express users privacy preferences on location information in a straightforward and intuitive way. Then, based on such location privacy preferences, we discuss a new solution, based on obfuscation techniques, which permits us to achieve, and quantitatively estimate through a metric, different degrees of location privacy.

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Location privacy protection through obfuscation-based techniques

The pervasive diffusion of mobile communication devices and the technical improvements of location techniques are fostering the development of new applications that use the physical position of users to offer location-based services for business, social, or informational purposes. In such a context, privacy concerns are increasing and call for sophisticated solutions able to guarantee different levels of location privacy to the users. In this paper, we address this problem and present a solution based on different obfuscation operators that, when used individually or in combination, protect the privacy of the location information of users. We also introduce an adversary model and provide an analysis of the proposed obfuscation operators to evaluate their robustness against adversaries aiming to reverse the obfuscation effects to retrieve a location that better approximates the location of the users. Finally, we present some experimental results that validate our solution.

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An Obfuscation-Based Approach for Protecting Location Privacy

Location-based Access Control (LBAC) techniques allow taking users' physical location into account when determining their access privileges. In this paper, we present an approach to LBAC aimed at integrating location-based conditions along with a generic access control model, so that a requestor can be granted or denied access by checking her location as well as her credentials. Our LBAC model includes a novel way of taking into account the limitations of the technology used to ascertain the location of the requester. Namely, we describe how location verification can be encapsulated as a service, representing location technologies underlying it in terms of two semantically uniform service level agreement (SLA) parameters called confidence and timeout. Based on these parameters, we present the formal definition of a number of location-based predicates, their management, evaluation, and enforcement. The challenges that such an extension to traditional access control policies inevitably carries are discussed also with reference to detailed examples of LBAC policies.

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Supporting location-based conditions in access control policies

The cloud computing paradigm has become a mainstream solution for the deployment of business processes and applications. In the public cloud vision, infrastructure, platform, and software services are provisioned to tenants (i.e., customers and service providers) on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud tenants can use cloud resources at lower prices, and higher performance and flexibility, than traditional on-premises resources, without having to care about infrastructure management. Still, cloud tenants remain concerned with the cloud’s level of service and the nonfunctional properties their applications can count on. In the last few years, the research community has been focusing on the nonfunctional aspects of the cloud paradigm, among which cloud security stands out. Several approaches to security have been described and summarized in general surveys on cloud security techniques. The survey in this article focuses on the interface between cloud security and cloud security assurance. First, we provide an overview of the state of the art on cloud security. Then, we introduce the notion of cloud security assurance and analyze its growing impact on cloud security approaches. Finally, we present some recommendations for the development of next-generation cloud security and assurance solutions.

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Claudio Agostino Ardagna

Papers

Location privacy in pervasive computing

Location privacy protection through obfuscation-based techniques

An Obfuscation-Based Approach for Protecting Location Privacy

Supporting location-based conditions in access control policies

From Security to Assurance in the Cloud: A Survey