Audit Scheme Research Articles

PP-CSA: A Privacy-Preserving Cloud Storage Auditing Scheme for Data Sharing

Data sharing is one important service provided by cloud storage. In order to share data conveniently and securely, Shen et al. proposed a cloud storage auditing scheme for data sharing, which uses the sanitizable signature to hide sensitive information. However, it may cause unauthorized access to the data, since anyone can access the data stored on the cloud server. This article proposes a privacy-preserving cloud storage auditing (PP-CSA) scheme for data sharing, where only authorized users can access the data. Furthermore, PP-CSA adopts the Diffie-Hellman protocol to avoid the secure channel between the data owner and the sanitizer. Finally, the security analysis and the experimental results prove that the security and efficiency of PP-CSA can be accepted.

A blockchain-based privacy-preserving 5G network slicing service level agreement audit scheme

Network slicing, as a key technique of 5G, provides a way that network operators can segment multiple virtual logic on the same physical network and each customer can order specific slicing which can meet his requirement of 5G service. The service level agreement of network slicing (NS-SLA) of 5G, as a business agreement signed between the network operators and the customers, specifies the relevant requirements for the 5G services provided by the network operators. However, the authenticity of auditing results may not be guaranteed and the customer’s data may be leaked in the existing NS-SLA audit scheme. In this paper, a blockchain-based 5G network slicing NS-SLA audit model is proposed to address the above problems. The blockchain is applied as a public platform and all the dual monitored service parameters will be stored on the blockchain to ensure the authenticity of data. A trapdoor order-revealing encryption algorithm is introduced to audit strategy, which can encrypt the monitored parameters, realize the comparison over ciphertexts and prevent the privacy of data from leaking. Besides, an NS-SLA audit smart contract is designed to implement the audit task and execute corresponding punishment strategies automatically. We make experiments to exam the cost of the blockchain-based system and the results found clear support for the feasibility of the proposed model.

Organizations towards the Evaluation of Environmental Management Tools ISO 14001 and EMAS

The purpose of this article is to analyze and compare the benefits of and barriers to the implementation of Environmental Management Systems (EMS)—International Standard ISO 14001 and Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS)—by organizations. This paper attempts to answer the following research questions: 1. Does the implementation of either ISO 14001 or EMAS bring the same benefits and barriers to organizations? 2. Does the system functioning duration in the company influence internal and external benefits resulting from EMS implementation? 3. Are economic aspects of EMS adoption as important for entrepreneurs as the ecological aspects? This topic is important due to the large disproportions appearing in recent years between the number of companies registered in ISO 14001 and in EMAS, and due to relatively frequent cases of non-renewal of EMAS certifications in recent years. It is crucial because each EMS certified institution has implemented procedures which contribute to better protection of the natural environment. The study was conducted in the form of a survey; questions and answers were specified based on the literature review and the authors’ research. Results indicate that the knowledge-based and organizational problems, as well as the time invested in preparing the documentation, are much more significant than financial problems associated with EMS implementation. Even organizations that previously introduced ISO 14001 still have difficulties with EMAS implementation. The perception of benefits resulting from EMS introduction is related to the system functioning duration in the company. The analysis shows that it is necessary to strengthen economic incentives in order to enable the widest possible dissemination of EMS among companies. Research results can contribute to further simplification and increases in EMS implementation, which may lead to more sustainable development and climate change mitigation, inter alia, due to the improvement in energy efficiency, increased use of renewable energy, and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Research on Data Security Audit in Cloud Computing for Big Data Environment

The modernization of industrial industry cannot be separated from the development of big data.In order to meet this challenge, cloud data integrity audit has been proposed in recent years and received extensive attention. Based on the in-depth study of the impact of different cloud storage data types on the audit scheme, this paper proposes an audit scheme based on Dynamic Hash table.Based on this, this paper explores a variety of cloud storage audit algorithms for different data types to deal with different security challenges.Facing a series of data security problems brought by cloud computing, this paper analyzes the concept, working principle and characteristics of cloud computing, and discusses the data security risks brought by cloud computing from four aspects. At the same time, this paper elaborates the data security strategy from five aspects: data transmission, data privacy, data isolation, data residue and data audit. In this paper, we propose to adopt end-to-end data encryption technology, build private cloud or hybrid cloud, share table architecture, destroy encrypted data related media, and introduce third-party certification authority for data audit.

Research on the influence of accounting computerization and networking on E-commerce

E-commerce has broken through the pattern and boundary of traditional commodity exchange, so that there is no need for face-to-face transactions between merchants and consumers. This has impacted the traditional accounting industry, which broke the environmental setting of traditional accounting industry. This requires the extension and expansion of the economic environment of the new accounting industry, which has led to the computerization of accounting and the network of further upgrades. Accounting computerization and networking have greatly improved the speed and accuracy of accounting information processing, and at the same time made the classification of accounting duties more clear. However, accounting computerization and higher-level networking have in turn affected the development of e-commerce. Due to the rapid development of e-commerce, the corresponding internal auditing schemes of traditional enterprises have been unable to meet accounting and computerization. The impact of this will constrain the further development of e-commerce. Accounting computerization and networking the internal audit of e-commerce is mainly reflected in clues, internal control, and content and environment issues. This paper analyses the impact of accounting computerization and networking on the internal auditing of e-commerce, and finally analyse the auditing setup and experience based on a company H in the accounting information system, and explore the accounting calculation. In the context of globalization and networking, the strategy of how to deal with the trial and control part of e-commerce.

Refiner

Modern mobile applications often produce decentralized data, i.e., a huge amount of privacy-sensitive data distributed over a large number of mobile devices. Techniques for learning models from decentralized data must properly handle two natures of such data, namely privacy and massive engagement. Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach for such a learning task since the technique learns models from data without exposing privacy. However, traditional FL methods assume that the participating mobile devices are honest volunteers. This assumption makes traditional FL methods unsuitable for applications where two kinds of participants are engaged: 1) self-interested participants who, without economical stimulus, are reluctant to contribute their computing resources unconditionally, and 2) malicious participants who send corrupt updates to disrupt the learning process. This paper proposes Refiner, a reliable federated learning system for tackling the challenges introduced by massive engagements of self-interested and malicious participants. Refiner is built upon Ethereum, a public blockchain platform. To engage self-interested participants, we introduce an incentive mechanism which rewards each participant in terms of the amount of its training data and the performance of its local updates. To handle malicious participants, we propose an audit scheme which employs a committee of randomly chosen validators for punishing them with no reward and preclude corrupt updates from the global model. The proposed incentive and audit scheme is implemented with cryptocurrency and smart contract, two primitives offered by Ethereum. This paper demonstrates the main features of Refiner by training a digit classification model on the MNIST dataset.

An Autonomous Robot-Aided Auditing Scheme for Floor Cleaning.

Cleaning is an important factor in most aspects of our day-to-day life. This research work brings a solution to the fundamental question of “How clean is clean” by introducing a novel framework for auditing the cleanliness of built infrastructure using mobile robots. The proposed system presents a strategy for assessing the quality of cleaning in a given area and a novel exploration strategy that facilitates the auditing in a given location by a mobile robot. An audit sensor that works by the “touch and inspect” analogy that assigns an audit score corresponds to its area of inspection has been developed. A vision-based dirt-probability-driven exploration is proposed to empower a mobile robot with an audit sensor on-board to perform auditing tasks effectively. The quality of cleaning is quantified using a dirt density map representing location-wise audit scores, dirt distribution pattern obtained by kernel density estimation, and cleaning benchmark score representing the extent of cleanliness. The framework is realized in an in-house developed audit robot to perform the cleaning audit in indoor and semi-outdoor environments. The proposed method is validated by experiment trials to estimate the cleanliness in five different locations using the developed audit sensor and dirt-probability-driven exploration.

THE METHODOLOGY FOR THE CREATION OF AN ADAPTED MODEL FOR THE TRANSITION TO THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY FOR THE SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES OF LATVIA IN A LONG TERM PERSPECTIVE

Research will focus on investments for the development of the company. Transition to the circular economy is understood in many cases only as an unnecessary obstacle, not as the new business model. Production based on the linear model "take, make, dispose of" is not possible anymore based on decreased environmental quality. Increased production efficiency could help promote the company's prestige, gain tax allowances, create optimistic co-operation with the state, municipality, and maintain sustainability in terms of the balance achieved between economic, environmental and social interests. Although the research until now is in an early stage, the research purpose is to create an adapted model for the implementation of the circular economy for the small and medium enterprises (from now on – SMEs) of Latvia in a long-term perspective. Research will focus on the following qualitative data analysis methods – SWOT, factor, economic contribution, structured interviews at expert level, overall structured interview in the form of the questionnaire. From quantitative methods, hierarchical cluster or partial cluster method will be used in this research, analysing 3966 organisations in the Eco-Management and audit scheme (from now on – EMAS) at the European level that ensure compliance with the essential environmental requirements under EMAS Regulation No.1221/2009 . Until now within the research, the number of EMAS organisations have been selected between 29 different countries (total number of observations) in 5 sectors (energy, water, waste management, food industry, port terminals), allowing to make the cross-country comparison and describe the involvement level of EMAS in each country. Before using the cluster method, it is essential to assess the cluster trend and whether the cluster method is suitable for research data. The next step will involve using a hierarchical cluster or partial cluster method (a certain number of clusters will be created). It is necessary to use different techniques to evaluate and interpret the created cluster results in future work. Until now, the main conclusion from the literature study is that Latvia has no organisation registered under EMAS and the term "circular economy" is a prevalent trend nowadays worldwide, which can be justified with 114 different terms of the circular economy. Expected results will be the following – issued new criteria for SMEs, issued the adapted model and issued recommendations and suggestions for developing the eco-innovation market.

Security Analysis and Improvements on a Remote Integrity Checking Scheme for Regenerating-Coding-Based Distributed Storage

Enabling remote data integrity checking with failure recovery becomes exceedingly critical in distributed cloud systems. With the properties of a lower repair bandwidth while preserving fault tolerance, regenerating coding and network coding (NC) have received much attention in the coding-based storage field. Recently, an outstanding outsourced auditing scheme named NC-Audit was proposed for regenerating-coding-based distributed storage. The scheme claimed that it can effectively achieve lightweight privacy-preserving data verification remotely for these networked distributed systems. However, our algebraic analysis shows that NC-Audit can be easily broken due to a potential defect existing in its schematic design. That is, an adversarial cloud server can forge some illegal blocks to cheat the auditor with a high probability when the coding field is large. From the perspective of algebraic security, we propose a remote data integrity checking scheme RNC-Audit by resorting to hiding partial critical information to the server without compromising system performance. Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has significantly lower overhead compared to the state-of-the-art schemes for distributed remote data auditing.

Managing Sustainability and Carbon-Neutrality in the Public Administration—Case Report of a German State Institution

Since 2017, the State Office for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection of North Rhine-Westphalia (LANUV) has established an operational environmental and sustainability management and set specific objectives to reach operational carbon neutrality. In this context, central questions aim at the availability of financial and human resources, the competition with other duties as well as the necessary involvement of the staff. Based on the practical example of LANUV, this article presents concrete activities, e.g., in context of mobility or human resources, as well as the challenges connected to them. While single measures do have a positive impact, a structural approach, like the set-up of an environmental management system (e.g., EMAS—Eco-Management and Audit Scheme), is found to be more effective. In addition, success factors are identified such as distinct structures and responsibilities, a capable person in charge of the process, and commitment on the management level, as well as challenges like the lack of governmental objectives and obligations or limited human and financial resources. This article follows the idea of a case report in a transdisciplinary manner, presenting ideas for enhancement and shedding a light on a possible spread of sustainability endeavors to other national institutions.

WITHDRAWN: An effective analytics of third party auditing and Trust architectures for integrity in cloud environment

Cloud storage is one of Cloud's infrastructures that preserves, handles, centrally backs up data and makes it available to users through a network (normally the Internet). When data may be assaulted or modified by unauthorised attackers, the cloud owner may be interested in the privacy of data contained within the cloud. A new idea known as Data Auditing is therefore being applied with the assistance of a third party auditor (TPA) firm to check data integrity. The main goal of this work is the creation of a stable and efficient audit scheme based on the trust architecture that guarantees the safety and confidentiality of records, including the security of privacy, public audits and other capable functions. Therefore, all these requirements have been taken up with the new method for auditing. The data owner, TPA and the cloud provider contain three organisations. The data owner performs a variety of operations, such as separating the file into blocks, encryption, hash value, combination and signature. The TPA conducts the core feature of data integrity checks and performs functions, including the generation, concatenating and signature generation of hash values for encrypted blocks retrieved from the cloud server. It then tests whether the data stored in the cloud is corrupted or not by matching all signatures. On demand of customers, it tests the quality of the results. Only encrypted data blocks are processed by the cloud provider. This proposed audit scheme and the confidence architecture facilitates complex encryption of complex, integrity assurance and digital signature computing by means of sophisticated cryptographic algorithms. This article introduces the faith architecture, which is the core basis for complex crypto graphing and forensic analyzer cloud auditing programmes.

A New Privacy-Ware Public Auditing Scheme for Cloud Data Sharing with Group Users

Cloud computing has been envision as the cutting edge engineering of IT Enterprise. It moves the application programming and information bases to the brought together huge server farms. A conveyed stockpiling system, containing a grouping of limit laborers, gives long stretch amassing organizations over the Internet. Putting away information in an outsider's cloud framework causes genuine worry over information mystery specifically, to accomplish effective information elements, we improve the current confirmation of capacity models by controlling square label verification. To help proficient treatment of different reviewing undertakings, we further investigate the method of mark to expand our primary outcome into a multi-client setting, where TPA can play out numerous evaluating errands all the while. Broad security and execution examination show that the proposed plans are profoundly proficient and provably secure.

Environmental Management of ISO 14001 System Enforcement in EU Countries

The European Union International Organization for Standardization management system for the environment (ISO 14001) is established by European Commission Regulation 1221/2009. This legislates a voluntary system where organizations can register in a community eco-management and audit scheme. In the literature, this standard is recognized as an instrument of international environmental protection law, introduced by soft law regulations. ISO 14001 has been implemented by many global and European organizations, and it strives to improve the quality of their environmental resources.
 It was considered that the ISO 14001 eco-management and audit scheme enforced protection of environment in EU countries by imposing the obligation to implement appropriate legal regulations in this area. This article aims is determine what legal solutions in chosen UE countries enable the effective implementation of ISO 14001 and what positive effects it has on the state of the environment in these countries.
 The results demonstrated that the number of certified organizations is increasing despite the many difficulties and costs of implementing and organizing required environmental protection areas. The implementation of ISO 14001 was described using the example of Poland and Italy compared to other EU countries. The uptake identifies improved environmental quality, and this is confirmed by indicators of decreasing gas emissions and increasing waste recycling which improve global air, soil and water quality. The higher implementation index of the ISO 14001 standard in Italy translates into higher environmental quality indicators in this country than in Poland.

Use of data auditing for encrypted data stored in cloud environment

The exponential growth of data generation and the increasing reliance on cloud-based storage solutions have raised significant concerns regarding data security and privacy. The widespread adoption of encryption techniques has been effective in protecting data confidentiality, but it also introduces new challenges in terms of data auditing. This paper explores the use of data auditing techniques for encrypted data stored in cloud environments to ensure data integrity, availability, and accountability while preserving privacy. We first provide an overview of the current state of cloud storage security and encryption techniques, followed by a discussion on the importance of data auditing for encrypted data. The paper then delves into existing data auditing approaches, specifically focusing on Public Key-based Auditing (PKA) and Private Key-based Auditing (PrKA) schemes. We examine their advantages, drawbacks, and suitability for different scenarios, highlighting their ability to maintain data privacy without compromising the auditing process. To address the limitations of current auditing techniques, we propose an innovative hybrid auditing framework that combines the strengths of PKA and PrKA schemes. Our approach enables efficient data auditing while ensuring data confidentiality, integrity, and privacy. It also supports dynamic data operations, including insertion, deletion, and modification, allowing for seamless adaptation to various cloud storage environments. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid auditing framework through a series of experiments, comparing it with existing PKA and PrKA solutions. The results demonstrate the superiority of our framework in terms of security, privacy preservation, and performance, making it a promising solution for auditing encrypted data in cloud environments.

Blockchain-Based Decentralized Public Auditing for Cloud Storage

Public auditing schemes for cloud storage systems have been extensively explored with the increasing importance of data integrity. A third-party auditor (TPA) is introduced in public auditing schemes to verify the integrity of outsourced data on behalf of users. To resist malicious TPAs, many blockchain-based public verification schemes have been proposed. However, existing auditing schemes rely on a centralized TPA, and they are vulnerable to tempting auditors who may collude with malicious blockchain miners to produce biased auditing results. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized public auditing (BDPA) scheme by utilizing a decentralized blockchain network to undertake the responsibility of a centralized TPA, and also mitigate the influence of tempting auditors and malicious blockchain miners by taking the concept of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). A detailed security analysis shows that BDPA can preserve data integrity against tempting auditors and malicious blockchain miners. A comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrates that BDPA is feasible and scalable.

Certificateless multi-replica public integrity auditing scheme for dynamic shared data in cloud storage

Cloud storage enables data users to store and access their data anytime, from any location, using any device, under a pay-per-use policy. However, cloud storage raises various security concerns such as integrity and availability of data. To address these problems simultaneously, recently, several multi-replica integrity auditing schemes have been proposed in the literature. However, most of the existing schemes are designed based on either the public key infrastructure (PKI) or identity-based cryptography (IBC), which suffers from a big burden of certificate management or key escrow problems. In this paper, we propose a Certficateless Multi-Replica Dynamic Public Auditing Scheme for Shared data in cloud storage to solve these problems. Our scheme supports shared data dynamics through a novel data structure, namely, the replica version table. Further, our scheme also supports secure user revocation from the group. Through the security analysis, we prove that our scheme is provably secure against type I/II/III adversaries under the hardness assumption of the standard CDH and DL problems in the random oracle model (ROM). The performance and experimental evaluation show that our scheme is efficient and practical.

Integrity Auditing for Multi-Copy in Cloud Storage Based on Red-Black Tree

With the rapid development of cloud storage, cloud users are willing to store data in the cloud storage system, and at the same time, the requirements for the security, integrity, and availability of data storage are getting higher and higher. Although many cloud audit schemes have been proposed, the data storage overhead is too large and the data cannot be dynamically updated efficiently when most of the schemes are in use. In order to solve these problems, a cloud audit scheme for multi-copy dynamic data integrity based on red-black tree full nodes is proposed. This scheme uses ID-based key authentication, and improves the classic Merkel hash tree MHT to achieve multi-copy storage and dynamic data manipulation, which improves the efficiency of real-time dynamic data update (insertion, deletion, modification). The third-party audit organization replaces users to verify the integrity of data stored on remote cloud servers, which reduces the computing overhead and system communication overhead. The security analysis proves that the security model based on the CDH problem and the DL problem is safe. Judging from the results of the simulation experiment, the scheme is safe and efficient.

Measuring the effect of perceived corruption on detention and incident risk in the maritime industry – An empirical analysis

This manuscript uses a global and comprehensive approach based on 1.14 million observations to investigate whether the effect of perceived corruption can be detected towards safety qualities of vessels. Since safety qualities of vessels are influenced by many factors and the effect of corruption can be confounded by their interactions, a multi-step approach is used at ship level. The findings confirm the hypothesis that port States with higher perceived corruption are less likely to detain vessels and that flag States or ship owners located in countries associated with higher perceived corruption are more likely to have very serious incidents as the operating environment might facilitate substandard shipping and weaker enforcement of international conventions or increased operating costs that can influence safety qualities of vessels in economic hardship. The analysis has also highlighted underreporting of serious incidents. The results support the establishment of accountability frameworks and current efforts at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to address corruption to support sustainable development goal 16 (SDG 16). Relevant policy implications could be to strengthen the fight against corruption via IMO's Member State Audit Scheme and Facilitation Committee in general and specifically by strengthening training and enforcement of the Code of Good Conduct for Port State Control Inspectors. To enhance transparency, the Global Integrated Ship Information System (GISIS) could be adjusted to include an option to report corruption directly by ship owners and operators to IMO. Mandatory reporting requirements of flag States should be revised to capture all serious incidents to GISIS.

Efficient and Secure Group based Collusion Resistant Public Auditing Scheme for Cloud Storage

Tremendous changes have been seen in the arena of cloud computing from previous years. Many organizations share their data or files on cloud servers to avoid infrastructure and maintenance costs. Employees from different departments create their specific groups and share sensitive information among group members. Revoked users from the group may try to access this information by colluding with an untrusted cloud server. Many researchers have specified revocation procedures using re-signature, proxy-re-signature concept to deflect the collusion between the cloud server and a revoked user. But these techniques are costly in terms of communication overhead and verification cost if combined with auditing techniques to prove the integrity of outsourced data on the cloud server. To reduce this cost, a collusion resistant public auditing scheme with group member revocation is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, the data owner regularly updates the recent valid members list which is used by a third-party auditor to validate the signature so that collusion can be avoided. To verify the integrity of outsourced data, proposed scheme uses one of the modern cryptographic technique indistinguishability obfuscation combined with a one-way function which can reduce the verification time significantly. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme decreases the communication overhead and verification cost compared to existing schemes.

Advanced Fuzzy-Based Smart Energy Auditing Scheme for Smart Building Environment With Solar Integrated Systems

Energy audit is a method of knowing the energy used in a particular area and to recognize the area where energy consumption can be minimized. Energy audit involves many tasks and these can be carried out depending of audited capability and the types of audit methods. It started with assessment the old data of energy consumption because these data is vital to know the patterns of energy used in a particular area. Then by using different techniques, energy consumption can be reduced. Whereas; it is difficult to manage the different operating time of the loads by older methods particularly when solar energy system is involved reason being the solar energy system cannot provide power all the time. Consequently when grid power and solar energy systems are involved, there should be intelligent control to offer the energy efficacy and to lessen the total power consumption. In this paper, Fuzzy based auditing methodology is considered to provide the excellent results for residential buildings. The energy utilization of different electrical appliances in operation and their operating parameters like temperature, humidity, efficiency and energy consumption etc. are taken into consideration for the analysis. The objective of this paper is to use a fuzzy logic controller for the energy consumption reduction analysis in Kasganj city of Uttar Pradesh state in India, by employing the utilization hours of the solar powered system and the required load demand using the time for which the different appliances are in operation. This analysis has been started with the survey of different buildings in order to get the information on present energy utilization. The energy audit presented in this work only concentrated in the 5 buildings in the Kasganj in order to take the real life conditions. Whereas, the fuzzy controller can set a threshold of power from grid and solar energy system that could not be exceeded as well as controlling the working hours of different appliances, otherwise it will affect the energy efficacy of the smart buildings. Results of the study shows, the percentage saving in money for each building using graphical analysis. The overall 69% cost reduction is achieved with the 5 buildings when solar energy system and grid power are involved using the proposed technique. This would make the transition towards sustainable development smoother and faster and this technique could be reflected on the real life situations.