Efficient Auditing Research Articles

Defining Complex Adaptive Systems: An Algorithmic Approach

Despite a profusion of literature on complex adaptive system (CAS) definitions, it is still challenging to definitely answer whether a given system is or is not a CAS. The challenge generally lies in deciding where the boundaries lie between a complex system (CS) and a CAS. In this work, we propose a novel definition for CASs in the form of a concise, robust, and scientific algorithmic framework. The definition allows a two-stage evaluation of a system to first determine whether it meets complexity-related attributes before exploring a series of attributes related to adaptivity, including autonomy, memory, self-organisation, and emergence. We demonstrate the appropriateness of the definition by applying it to two case studies in the medical and supply chain domains. We envision that the proposed algorithmic approach can provide an efficient auditing tool to determine whether a system is a CAS, also providing insights for the relevant communities to optimise their processes and organisational structures.

Development of hybrid heuristic‐assisted dynamic data auditing strategy in cloud sector

AbstractCloud computing is performed by hosting the data of data owners on cloud servers, where the data consumers (users) are able to get the data over servers. Though, several security aspects are raised during cloud storage regarding the data availability and data integrity. On the other hand, a novel scheme of data hosting services is introduced owing to data outsourcing which also raises additional security problems. In addition, several methods are presented by taking either “identity‐based cryptography (IBC) or public key infrastructure (PKI).” Hence, a secure and effective dynamic data auditing scheme is preferable for convincing data owners to ensure precise data storage in the cloud. This paper focuses on implementing a new hybrid heuristic‐assisted strategy for managing cloud storage with the help of efficient auditing schemes. This paper tries to optimize the data structures in the cloud storage with a new improved hybrid differential evolution‐teamwork optimization algorithm (HED‐TOA) with the integration of the teamwork optimization algorithm (TOA) and differential evolution (DE) algorithms. It aims to alleviate the problems raised during the dynamic data update operations including “insert, modify, delete, and append.” This improved HED‐TOA help in performing the data auditing. This model overcomes the problem of modifications occurring in the data structure while doing the dynamic data update operations and thus, it ensures efficient data auditing and data management in cloud computing. This work considers the aim of reducing computation as well as communication costs during the data storage process in the cloud. The performance estimation demonstrates that there is considerable contrast between the traditional methods and the proposed technique in terms of the communication and computation cost on the cloud and auditor.

A SURVEY ON EFFICIENT AUDITING SCHEME FOR SECURE DATA STORAGE IN FOG-TO-CLOUD COMPUTING

With the rise of the Internet of Things, fog-to-cloud computing has emerged as a new cutting-edge approach (IoT). Except for the cloud service provider, fog-to-cloud computing necessitates the participation of additional entities, such as mobile sinks and fog nodes (CSP). As a result, fog-to-cloud storage integrity audits will differ from standard cloud storage auditing. Tian et al. has completed the first stage in developing a public auditing system for fog-to-cloud computing. However, because they employ complex public key cryptography techniques like bilinear mapping and proof of knowledge, their system becomes inefficient. We offer a more broad and efficient auditing system based on MAC and HMAC, two prominent private key cryptography algorithms in this study. By implementing MAC and HMAC, we give a real instantiation of our auditing system. Finally, theoretical analysis and actual findings show that our suggested system has lower communication and computing costs.

Microscale pedestrian environment surrounding pedestrian injury sites in Washington state, 2015–2020

Objective While microscale pedestrian environment features such as sidewalks and crosswalks can affect pedestrian safety, it is challenging to assess microscale environment associated risk across locations or at scale. Addressing these challenges requires an efficient auditing protocol that can be used to assess frequencies of microscale environment features. For this reason, we developed an eight-item pedestrian environment virtual audit protocol and conducted a descriptive epidemiologic study of pedestrian injury in Washington State, USA. Methods We used data from police reports at pedestrian-automotive collision sites where the pedestrian was seriously injured or died. At each collision site, high school students participating in an online summer internship program virtually audited Google Street View imagery to assess the presence of microscale pedestrian environment features such as crosswalks and streetlighting. We assessed inter-rater reliability using Cohen’s kappa and explored prevalence of eight microscale environment features in relation to injury severity and municipal boundaries. Results There were 2248 motor vehicle crashes eliciting police response and resulting in death or serious injury of a pedestrian in Washington State between January 1, 2015 and May 8, 2020. Of the crashes resulting in serious injury or death, 498 (22%) resulted in fatalities and 1840 (82%) occurred within municipal boundaries. Cohen’s kappa scores for the eight pedestrian features that were audited ranged from 0.52 to 0.86. Audit results confirmed that features such as sidewalks and crosswalks were more common at collision sites within city limits. Conclusions High school student volunteers with minimal training can reliably audit microscale pedestrian environments using limited resources.

Provable Cloud Data Transfer with Efficient Integrity Auditing for Cloud Computing

Due to the promising market prospects, more and more enterprises invest cloud storage and offer on-demand data storage services, which are characterized by distinct quality; thus, users would dynamically change the cloud service providers and transfer their outsourced data. However, the original cloud server might not honestly transfer the outsourced data for saving overhead, and the outsourced data might be polluted during the transfer process. Therefore, how to achieve secure outsourced data transfer has become a primary concern of users. To solve this issue, we put forward a solution for the issue of provable cloud data transfer, which can also simultaneously realize efficient data integrity auditing. By taking the advantages of Merkle sum hash tree (MSHT), our presented scheme can satisfy verifiability without dependency on a third party auditor (TPA). Meanwhile, the formal security proof can demonstrate that our presented scheme meets all of the expected security requirements. Finally, we implement our presented scheme and offer the precise performance evaluation, which can intuitively show the high-efficiency and practicality of our presented scheme in the real-world applications.

Third-party enabled auditing for uniqueness-based integrity and data sharing with information hiding

The majority data are now kept in the cloud. There are many Cloud storage applications used to exchange data that range from normal to highly sensitive. Among the most essential security measures in cloud is Cloud auditing. It is the process of validating the reliability of data stored in the cloud. As of the inevitability of hardware problems, system failures and errors by people these data may be corrupted or lost. An efficient auditing system to determine whether or not the data is corrupted is a challenging task among the recent research. This paper proposes a third-party enabled auditing methodology to ensure data integrity, privacy data sharing and protect against outside attackers in the public cloud. In this proposed method, the record / data owner generates signatures or add sanitizer before importing sensitive data blocks into the cloud. The record blocks that report sensitive data are sanitized, and the signatures of those records blocks are converted into legitimate ones for the sanitized report. As a result, the records saved in the cloud have the identical signature. Then a third-party auditor is implemented to confirm the cloud's storage accuracy by validating the reliability of the cloud records on the person's behalf.

Efficient Auditing Scheme for Secure Data Storage in Fog to Cloud Computing

Efficient Auditing Scheme for Secure Data Storage in Fog to Cloud Computing

Elements of Commerce Shows Enterprise Development Innovation Efficient Auditing and the Way of the Future

Technological entrepreneurship helps create sustainable value, accelerate corporate growth and promote economic sustainability through the capitalization and commercialization of innovative new technologies. There are obstacles in conducting Business Model Innovation (BMI) as a reference form of technological entrepreneurship as a reference. This study aims to establish a business model for developing the economy with technological entrepreneurship innovation (BMIfTE). Readiness is one of the keys in carrying out a goal, because there are things that must be prepared, such as the topics discussed in papers related to previous researchers who have published the development of a BMIfTE. For this reason, the paper in this study discusses opportunities and risks, value transitions, economic development, strategies for companies, dynamic capabilities and stakeholders. The new proposal is a form of BMI reconstruction regarding the business model in function of technology to create new systems and methods to take advantage of existing business development opportunities to be able to compete and stand in the national market.

Efficient Privacy-Preserving Certificateless Public Auditing of Data in Cloud Storage

Cloud computing is a fast-growing technology which supplies scalable, innovative, and efficient business models. However, cloud computing is not fully trusted, and the security of the data outsourced in cloud storage needs to be guaranteed. One of the hottest issues is how to ensure the integrity of the data in cloud storage. Until now, many researchers have proposed lots of provable data possession (PDP) schemes to deal with the problem of data integrity audition. Nevertheless, very little effort has been devoted to preserve the data uploader’s privacy while auditing the integrity of data shared in a group. To overcome the shortcoming, we propose a novel certificateless PDP protocol to efficiently audit the integrity of data shared in a workgroup with user privacy preserving. Due to the inherent structural advantage of the certificateless crypto mechanism, our PDP scheme eliminates the key escrow problem and the certificate management problem simultaneously. Moreover, the audition process in our scheme does not need any user’s identity which helps to keep the anonymity of data uploader. We give for our scheme a detailed security proof and efficiency analysis. Experiment results of performance evaluation demonstrate that our new scheme is very efficient and feasible.

Efficient TPA-based auditing scheme for secure cloud storage

In recent years, how to design efficient auditing protocol to verify the integrity of users’ data, which is stored in cloud services provider (CSP), becomes a research focus. Homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) and homomorphic signature are two popular techniques to respectively design private and public auditing protocols. On the one hand, it is not suitable for the homomorphic-MAC-based auditing protocols to be outsourced to third-party auditor (TPA), who has more professional knowledge and computational abilities, although they have high efficiencies. On the other hand, the homomorphic-signature-based ones are very suitable for employing TPA without compromising user’s signing key but have very low efficiency (compared to the former case). In this paper, we propose a new auditing protocol, which perfectly combines the advantages of above two cases. In particular, it is almost as efficient as a homomorphic-MAC-based protocol proposed by Zhang et al. recently. Moreover, it is also suitable for outsourcing to TPA because it does not compromise the privacy of users’ signing key, which can be seen from our security analysis. Finally, numerical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the high-efficiency of our protocol.

Public sector accounting contexts in the EPSAS change: a comparative study of Italy and Sweden

Comparing Italy and Sweden, which are countries with different cultural and accounting traditions, this article focuses on the characteristics of their standard-setting processes for the public sector in order to evaluate their prerequisites for international harmonization. The recent attempt by European bodies to stimulate an international public sector accounting harmonization process, the European Public Sector Accounting Standards programme, requires that each country involved in the process assumes its position, taking into account a number of national factors and conditions. To this end, the research identifies the potential positive factors of a national public sector accounting standard-setting context that are favourable to international harmonization. While both countries differ in some respects, the study discusses how the ideal prerequisites can constitute a positive environment in which to implement international harmonization in the European context. Points for practitioners This comparative study identifies conditions to enhance an efficient and reliable national standard-setting process, summarizing the potential positive factors investigated in both countries. It argues that institutional arrangements and specific governance factors (a flexible legal system, efficient auditing, vertical harmonization, an inclusive and participative standard-setting process, and the maturity of accrual accounting) can support key actors in the public sector to react positively to international harmonization, with some emerging scepticism regarding the European Public Sector Accounting Standards programme.

Efficient Auditing Scheme for Secure Data Storage in Fog-to-Cloud Computing

Fog-to-cloud computing has now become a new cutting-edge technique along with the rapid popularity of Internet of Things (IoT). Unlike traditional cloud computing, fog-to-cloud computing needs more entities to participate in, including mobile sinks and fog nodes except for cloud service provider (CSP). Hence, the integrity auditing in fog-to-cloud storage will also be different from that of traditional cloud storage. In the recent work of Tian et al., they took the first step to design public auditing system for fog-to-cloud computing. However, their scheme becomes very inefficient since they uses intricate public key cryptographic techniques, including bilinear mapping, proof of knowledge etc. In this paper, we design a general and more efficient auditing system based on MAC and HMAC, both of which are popular private key cryptographic techniques. By implementing MAC and HMAC, we give a concrete instantiation of our auditing system. Finally, the theoretical analysis and experiment results show that our proposed system has more efficiency in terms of communication and computational costs.

A secure and scalable data integrity auditing scheme based on hyperledger fabric

As our society becomes smarter and more interconnected, more data such as those generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices are stored remotely. These devices and services are generally externally owned and operated (e.g., commercial cloud servers). Hence, there has been interest in verifying the integrity of outsourced data, such as those stored in the remote cloud server, for example using schemes involving a third-party auditor (TPA). However, existing solutions involving TPA do not generally consider credibility and centralization, and such solutions may not be easily scalable. Thus, in this paper, we propose an efficient decentralized data integrity auditing scheme based on Hyperledger Fabric (HF-Audit), a popular consortium blockchain. Specifically, we use Hyperledger Fabric as a communication platform, where TPA can be dynamically selected for each auditing task. In order to improve the scalability of TPA, we design an efficient auditing protocol for data integrity based on bilinear pairing and commitments. Also, to improve auditing efficiency, we design two TPA selection algorithms under complete and incomplete information. Finally, we prove the security of the proposed approach, and evaluate its performance to demonstrate the utility of our proposed approach.

Efficient Data Integrity and Auditing in Cloud by using Block Chain

Efficient Data Integrity and Auditing in Cloud by using Block Chain

Research on Challenges and Countermeasures of China Enterprise Auditing under the Background of Big Data

With the continuous development of information technology and the popularization of the Internet, the information age represented by big data has arrived, and major enterprises are gradually exploring the road of integration and development with the Internet (AICPA, 2014). Auditing is an important part of the internal control management of an enterprise. Audit supervision and audit analysis and evaluation can help enterprises find problems in service management and business management, which is an important guarantee for the sustainable development of an enterprise. In the context of big data, the auditing work of an enterprise should be innovative in methods and methods. With the help of data platforms and information networks, a more complete and efficient auditing model should be constructed (Bilal et al., 2016).

Value-added tax fraud detection with scalable anomaly detection techniques

The tax fraud detection domain is characterized by very few labelled data (known fraud/legal cases) that are not representative for the population due to sample selection bias. We use unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) techniques, which are uncommon in tax fraud detection research, to deal with these domain issues. We analyse a unique dataset containing the VAT declarations and client listings of all Belgian VAT numbers pertaining to ten sectors. Our methodology consists in applying AD methods to firms belonging to the same sector and enables an efficient auditing strategy that can be adopted by tax authorities worldwide. The high lifts and hit rates observed in most sectors demonstrate the success of this approach. Sectoral differences exist due to varying market conditions and legal requirements across sectors and we show that the optimal AD method is sector dependent. We focus on three methodological problems that show issues in the related literature. (1) Can we design suitable input features? We develop new fraud indicators from specific fields of the VAT form and client listings and show the predictive value of the combination of these features. (2) Can we design fast algorithms to deal with the large data sizes that can occur in the tax domain? New methods are developed and we demonstrate their scalability both theoretically as well as empirically. (3) How should fraud detection performance be assessed? A new evaluation methodology is proposed that provides reliable performance indications and guarantees that fraud cases are effectively detected by the proposed methods.

An Efficient Auditing Protocol For Information Sharing and Secured Distributed Storage

An Efficient Auditing Protocol For Information Sharing and Secured Distributed Storage

Dynamic-Hash-Table Based Public Auditing for Secure Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is an increasingly popular application of cloud computing, which can provide on-demand outsourcing data services for both organizations and individuals. However, users may not fully trust the cloud service providers (CSPs) in that it is difficult to determine whether the CSPs meet their legal expectations for data security. Therefore, it is critical to develop efficient auditing techniques to strengthen data owners’ trust and confidence in cloud storage. In this paper, we present a novel public auditing scheme for secure cloud storage based on dynamic hash table (DHT), which is a new two-dimensional data structure located at a third parity auditor (TPA) to record the data property information for dynamic auditing. Differing from the existing works, the proposed scheme migrates the authorized information from the CSP to the TPA, and thereby significantly reduces the computational cost and communication overhead. Meanwhile, exploiting the structural advantages of the DHT, our scheme can also achieve higher updating efficiency than the state-of-the-art schemes. In addition, we extend our scheme to support privacy preservation by combining the homomorphic authenticator based on the public key with the random masking generated by the TPA, and achieve batch auditing by employing the aggregate BLS signature technique. We formally prove the security of the proposed scheme, and evaluate the auditing performance by detailed experiments and comparisons with the existing ones. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively achieve secure auditing for cloud storage, and outperforms the previous schemes in computation complexity, storage costs and communication overhead.

Усовершенствование законодательно-нормативного регулирования деятельности банков

The article studies the problems of banks solvency during the crisis. It examines the organizational model of control improvement in order to conduct an efficient and independent internal auditing. It also suggests the ways to improve legislative and statutory regulation of the bank activity on the basis of Basel standards.

An Examination the Factors Influence on Unethical Behaviour among Jordanian external auditors: Job Satisfaction as a mediator

In the past several years, the auditors’ unethical behaviour has been increasingly highlighted. This is particularly true following the Enron collapse that heralded that the demise of Arthur Andersen LLP and downgraded the confidence of the public on the whole accounting system and firms. The negative publicity stemming from the professional auditing firms with regards to the execution of an efficient audit led efficient auditing, and the reasons and causes behind negative behaviours should be highlighted to eliminate them. This is particularly important as there is a high likelihood of another Enron waiting to happen. Therefore, in this paper, some of the factors influencing the inclination towards engaging in unethical behaviours among Jordanian external auditors were examined. According to recent studies, dysfunctional audit behaviour is an expansive issue and studies to dedicated to the topic has yet to sufficiently shed an insight into the causes/determinants of deviant behaviour among auditors (Donnelly et al., 2011). The present study developed and tested a theoretical model that identifies locus of control, time pressure, and leadership style and job satisfaction as determinants of attitude towards DAB through a path analysis method.