Jean Bacon

Bio: Jean Bacon is an academic researcher from University of Cambridge. The author has contributed to research in topics: Middleware (distributed applications) & Event (computing). The author has an hindex of 38, co-authored 176 publications receiving 6116 citations. Previous affiliations of Jean Bacon include The Hertz Corporation & Universities UK.

Hermes: a distributed event-based middleware architecture

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that there is a need for an event-based middleware to build large-scale distributed systems. Existing publish/subscribe systems still have limitations compared to invocation-based middlewares. We introduce Hermes, a novel event-based distributed middleware architecture that follows a type- and attribute-based publish/subscribe model. It centres around the notion of an event type and supports features commonly known from object-oriented languages like type hierarchies and super-type subscriptions. A scalable routing algorithm using an overlay routing network is presented that avoids global broadcasts by creating rendezvous nodes. Fault-tolerance mechanisms that can cope with different kinds of failures in the middleware are integrated with the routing algorithm resulting in a scalable and robust system.

Using trust for secure collaboration in uncertain environments

Abstract: The SECURE project investigates the design of security mechanisms for pervasive computing based on trust. It addresses how entities in unfamiliar pervasive computing environments can overcome initial suspicion to provide secure collaboration.

Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract: This issues Works in Progress department features 10 interesting ongoing intelligent transportation systems projects. The first five projects (TIME, Sentient Transport, EVT, DynaCHINA, TrafficView) focus on traffic and vehicular data collection, transmission, and analysis. The sixth projects aims to provide intelligent-copilot services for driven, while the seventh focuses on asset identification and data collection for railroad environments. The eighth and ninth projects are budding application development environments for automobiles, and the tenth project is designing a multimodal biometric identification system for travel documents

A model of OASIS role-based access control and its support for active security

Abstract: OASIS is a role-based access control architecture for achieving secure interoperation of services in an open, distributed environment. The aim of OASIS is to allow autonomous management domains to specify their own access control policies and to interoperate subject to service level agreements (SLAs). Services define roles and implement formally specified policy to control role activation and service use; users must present the required credentials, in an appropriate context, in order to activate a role or invoke a service. All privileges are derived from roles, which are activated for the duration of a session only. In addition, a role is deactivated immediately if any of the conditions of the membership rule associated with its activation becomes false. These conditions can test the context, thus ensuring active monitoring of security.To support the management of privileges, OASIS introduces appointment. Users in certain roles are authorized to issue other users with appointment certificates, which may be a prerequisite for activating one or more roles. The conditions for activating a role at a service may include appointment certificates as well as prerequisite roles and constraints on the context. An appointment certificate does not therefore convey privileges directly but can be used as a credential for role activation. The lifetime of appointment certificates is not restricted to the issuing session, so they can be used as long-lived credentials to represent academic and professional qualification, or membership of an organization.Role-based access control (RBAC), in associating privileges with roles, provides a means of expressing access control that is scalable to large numbers of principals. However, pure RBAC associates privileges only with roles, whereas applications often require more fine-grained access control. Parametrized roles extend the functionality to meet this need.We motivate our approach and formalise OASIS. We first present the overall architecture through a basic model, followed by an extended model that includes parametrization.

Twenty Security Considerations for Cloud-Supported Internet of Things

Abstract: To realize the broad vision of pervasive computing, underpinned by the “Internet of Things” (IoT), it is essential to break down application and technology-based silos and support broad connectivity and data sharing; the cloud being a natural enabler. Work in IoT tends toward the subsystem, often focusing on particular technical concerns or application domains, before offloading data to the cloud. As such, there has been little regard given to the security, privacy, and personal safety risks that arise beyond these subsystems; i.e., from the wide-scale, cross-platform openness that cloud services bring to IoT. In this paper, we focus on security considerations for IoT from the perspectives of cloud tenants, end-users, and cloud providers, in the context of wide-scale IoT proliferation, working across the range of IoT technologies (be they things or entire IoT subsystems). Our contribution is to analyze the current state of cloud-supported IoT to make explicit the security considerations that require further work.

A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision

Abstract: Trust and reputation systems represent a significant trend in decision support for Internet mediated service provision. The basic idea is to let parties rate each other, for example after the completion of a transaction, and use the aggregated ratings about a given party to derive a trust or reputation score, which can assist other parties in deciding whether or not to transact with that party in the future. A natural side effect is that it also provides an incentive for good behaviour, and therefore tends to have a positive effect on market quality. Reputation systems can be called collaborative sanctioning systems to reflect their collaborative nature, and are related to collaborative filtering systems. Reputation systems are already being used in successful commercial online applications. There is also a rapidly growing literature around trust and reputation systems, but unfortunately this activity is not very coherent. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of existing and proposed systems that can be used to derive measures of trust and reputation for Internet transactions, to analyse the current trends and developments in this area, and to propose a research agenda for trust and reputation systems.

The many faces of publish/subscribe

Abstract: Well adapted to the loosely coupled nature of distributed interaction in large-scale applications, the publish/subscribe communication paradigm has recently received increasing attention. With systems based on the publish/subscribe interaction scheme, subscribers register their interest in an event, or a pattern of events, and are subsequently asynchronously notified of events generated by publishers. Many variants of the paradigm have recently been proposed, each variant being specifically adapted to some given application or network model. This paper factors out the common denominator underlying these variants: full decoupling of the communicating entities in time, space, and synchronization. We use these three decoupling dimensions to better identify commonalities and divergences with traditional interaction paradigms. The many variations on the theme of publish/subscribe are classified and synthesized. In particular, their respective benefits and shortcomings are discussed both in terms of interfaces and implementations.

TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones

Abstract: Today’s smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with visibility into how third-party applications collect and share their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid enables realtime analysis by leveraging Android’s virtualized execution environment. TaintDroid incurs only 32p performance overhead on a CPU-bound microbenchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, in our 2010 study we found 20 applications potentially misused users’ private information; so did a similar fraction of the tested applications in our 2012 study. Monitoring the flow of privacy-sensitive data with TaintDroid provides valuable input for smartphone users and security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications.

TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones

Abstract: Today's smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with adequate control over and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid provides realtime analysis by leveraging Android's virtualized execution environment. TaintDroid incurs only 14% performance overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, we found 68 instances of potential misuse of users' private information across 20 applications. Monitoring sensitive data with TaintDroid provides informed use of third-party applications for phone users and valuable input for smartphone security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications.