Personal Cloud Research Articles

Cloud-based federated identity for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has significant security and privacy risks. Recent attacks have shown that not only are many IoT devices at risk of exploit, but those devices can be successfully used to attack wider systems and cause economic damage. Currently, most devices connect to a cloud service that is provided by the manufacturer of the device, offering no choice to move to more secure systems. We outline a proposed model for IoT that allows the identity of users and devices to be federated. Users and devices are issued with secure, random, anonymised identities that are not shared with third parties. We demonstrate how devices can be connected to third-party applications without inherently de-anonymising them. Sensor data and actuator commands are federated through APIs to cloud services. All access to device data and commands is based on explicit consent from users. Each user’s data is handled by a personal cloud instance providing improved security and isolation, as well as providing a trusted intermediary for both devices and cloud services. We demonstrate this model is workable with a prototype system that implements the major features of the model. We present experiment results including performance, energy usage, capacity and cost metrics from the prototype. We compare this work with other related work and outline areas for discussion and future work.

Promoting collaborative skills in online university: comparing effects of games, mixed reality, social media, and other tools for ICT-supported pedagogical practices

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the development of collaborative skills through nine tools for information and communication technologies (ICT)-supported pedagogical practices, which are used in online universities. Using survey data for 930 online students at the Open University of Catalonia and partial least squares path modelling estimation techniques, three main findings emerged from the study. First, collaborative skills are directly explained by gamification and the use of mixed reality and social media in a socio-technical online learning context. Second, other tools for ICT-supported pedagogical practices (media content, wikis, open educational resources, personal webpages, personal cloud, and sharing files with fellow students and lecturers on the cloud) are not significant on collaborative skills development, when compared to use of games, mixed reality, and social media. Third, the analysis of indirect effects suggests that all four socio-technical factors (ICT, learning tasks, students, and organisation) existing in online university play a decisive, positive and significant role in collaborative skills development. Finally, these results are shown in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM studies. Thus, gamification, mixed reality, and sharing files are significant ICT-supported pedagogical practices in STEM studies. On the other hand, gamification is the only significant tool in non-STEM studies. Results are very useful for new approaches to design a framework for learning-team effectiveness in computer-supported collaborative learning.

ERRATUM: Cloud Computing for Pharmacometrics: Using AWS, NONMEM, PsN, Grid Engine, and Sonic.

Cloud computing allows pharmacometricians to access advanced hardware, network, and security resources available to expedite analysis and reporting. Cloud-based computing environments are available at a fraction of the time and effort when compared to traditional local datacenter-based solutions. This tutorial explains how to get started with building your own personal cloud computer cluster using Amazon Web Services (AWS), NONMEM, PsN, Grid Engine, and Sonic.

Exposure to brominated and organophosphate ester flame retardants in U.S. childcare environments: Effect of removal of flame-retarded nap mats on indoor levels

We assessed exposure to 39 brominated and 16 organophosphate ester flame retardants (FRs) from both dust and indoor air at seven childcare centres in Seattle, USA, and investigated the importance of nap mats as a source of these chemicals. Many childcare centres serving young children use polyurethane foam mats for the children's naptime. Until recently, the vast majority of these mats sold in the United States contained flame-retarded polyurethane foam to meet California Technical Bulletin 117 (TB117) requirements. With the 2013 update of TB117, allowing manufacturers to meet flammability standards without adding FRs to filling materials, FR-free nap mats have become widely available. We conducted an intervention study by actively switching out FR-treated nap mats with FR-free nap mats and measuring FR levels in indoor air and dust before and after the switch-out. The predominant FRs found in dust and indoor air were 2-ethylhexyl tetrabromobenzoate (EHTBB) and tris(1-chloro-2-propyl) phosphate (TCIPP), respectively. Nap mat samples analysed from four of the six centres contained a Firemaster® mixture, while one mat was predominantly treated with tris(1,3-dichloroisopropyl) phosphate (TDCIPP) and the other contained no detectable target FRs. After replacement, there was a significant decrease (p = 0.03–0.09) in median dust concentrations for bis(2-ethylhexyl) tetrabromophthalate (BEHTBP), EHTBB, tris(4-butylphenyl) phosphate (TBPP), and TDCIPP with reductions of 90%, 79%, 65%, and 42%, respectively. These findings suggest that the nap mats were an important source of these FRs to dust in the investigated childcare environments and that a campaign of swapping out flame-retarded mats for FR-free ones would reduce exposure to these chemicals. While calculated exposure estimates to the investigated FRs via inhalation, dust ingestion, and dermal absorption were below established reference dose values, they are likely underestimated when considering the toddlers' direct contact to the mats and personal cloud effects.

The particles around us

The particles around us

Exploring users’ experiences of using personal cloud storage services: a phenomenological study

ABSTRACTRecently, cloud computing has attracted great attention for both personal and organisational usages. Despite a large number of research conducted about cloud adoption, little is known about how users practically experienced the usage and adoption of Personal Could Storage Service (PCSSs) particularly in the context of developing countries. To address this gap, this paper seeks a clear understanding of how participants have profoundly experienced and perceived PCSSs to obtain worthwhile insights towards the essence of PCSSs’ adoption as a multifaceted phenomenon. Applying the interpretive phenomenology as a research method, required data were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with 12 experienced participants. The results reveal that users’ intentions to adopt PCSSs are highly influenced by three emerged themes, including demand-side factors, supply-side factors, and institutional factors. Concerning the demand-side factors, the paper demonstrates how user-centric aspects work in favour of PCSSs’ adoption. As to the supply-side factors, this research promotes an understanding of how the participants have perceived tangible and non-tangible features of PCSSs as a determinant of the adoption. Regarding the formal and informal institutions, remarkable roles of regulatory environments and culture are highlighted, respectively. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed for both academia and practitioners.

A CCA-secure key-policy attribute-based proxy re-encryption in the adaptive corruption model for dropbox data sharing system

The notion of attribute-based proxy re-encryption extends the traditional proxy re-encryption to the attribute-based setting. In an attribute-based proxy re-encryption scheme, the proxy can convert a ciphertext under one access policy to another ciphertext under a new access policy without revealing the underlying plaintext. Attribute-based proxy re-encryption has been widely used in many applications, such as personal health record and cloud data sharing systems. In this work, we propose the notion of key-policy attribute-based proxy re-encryption, which supports any monotonic access structures on users’ keys. Furthermore, our scheme is proved against chosen-ciphertext attack secure in the adaptive model.

Survey: Wireless and Mobile Ad Hoc Network Routing and Satellite Communication Challenges

Wireless and mobile communication increase from time to time due to the advancement of technology and the invention of the mobile device as well as the interest of the people shift from fixed communication to mobile because they need to access data service using their mobile device at anywhere and anytime for audiovisual and multimedia service. As technology becomes advanced the interest of the human being increase and they want to make easy their life by using of their devices like locationbased service, personal environment service and mobile cloud computing. In wireless and mobile communication, there are challenges and open research areas like routing in mobile ad hoc network, satellite communication, and cellular network

Principal steps for monitoring real time patients through ICT in developing Countries

Abstract In this publication, We have chosen an important field in Computer Networks and system information’s Nowadays, the widespread use of Information and Communication Technology has permeated through almost every aspect of life, including the healthcare sector. The health information system is the establishment of a standardized interchange platform of patient’s data, through network infrastructure, hardware equipment and software solutions. A suggested monitoring Framework system can be able to sustain the need of self-management for target group people such as with chronic diseases, stress, psychological stress-related issues due to high workload, de-concentration and anxiety, and we claim that the existing technology has got the capacity to improve the quality of life for patients in development country. Depending on the patient’s treatment group and profile it will be determined which monitoring technologies will be selected, such as: static or worn intelligent sensors, mobile technologies or personal PC, local server or cloud services, internal or external protocols, algorithms for communication and data analysis.

Exploiting Parallelism for Access Conflict Minimization in Flash-Based Solid State Drives

Solid state drives (SSDs) have been widely deployed in personal computers, data centers, and cloud storages. In order to improve performance, SSDs are usually constructed with a number of channels with each channel connecting to a number of nand flash chips, each flash chip consisting of multiple dies and each die containing multiple planes. Based on this parallel architecture, I/O requests are potentially able to access parallel units simultaneously. Despite the rich parallelism offered by the parallel architecture, recent studies show that the utilization of flash parallel units is seriously low. This paper shows that the low parallel unit utilization is highly caused by the access conflict among I/O requests. In this paper, we propose parallel issue queueing (PIQ), a novel I/O scheduler at the host systems. PIQ groups I/O requests without conflicts into the same batch and I/O requests with conflicts into different batches. Hence, the multiple I/O requests in one batch can be fulfilled simultaneously by exploiting the rich parallelism of SSDs. Extensive experimental results show that PIQ delivers significant performance improvement especially for the applications which have heavy access conflicts.

Performance Analysis of Personal Cloud Storage Services for Mobile Multimedia Health Record Management

Recently, the trend of mobile multimedia services and applications being used for e-health is growing in popularity. This is because people can get access to their electronic personal health records (PHRs), such as medical history, lab reports from an X-ray, MRI, clinical audio-visual notes, EEG/ECG data, and insurance policy details from anywhere, at any time, from their mobile or handheld devices. In this scenario, a medical care provider or a patient is responsible for uploading and managing the patient’s health information via cloud storage services. There are a number of personal cloud storage services that could be used such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box. However, the different designs of these personal cloud storage services mean there are differences in their performance in terms of storing and managing PHRs. In this paper, we present the details of our study on the performance of personal cloud storage services, and we highlight the strengths and weaknesses of such services in terms of PHR management. We investigate the performance of personal cloud storage services by conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of them. The qualitative analysis highlights strengths and weaknesses in terms of supported capabilities/features and shortcomings in terms of potential features that have not been implemented. The capabilities we analyze are chunking, bundling, deduplication, delta-encoding, and data compression. In the quantitative analysis, we investigate performance in terms of control data overhead, impact of data size on number of packets as well as transmission rate, synchronization initialization time, and protocol overhead. During testing with diverse benchmark size on distinct cloud storage services, we attained an average transmission of 93%, 3%, and 4% for application data, control data, and other data, respectively. This research allows us to identify open issues and to determine future directions for developing an efficient personal cloud storage service.

An SDN/NFV Platform for Personal Cloud Services

In the last few years, network “softwarization” is gaining increasing popularity to achieve dynamicity and flexibility. Cloud computing, as well as the new paradigms of software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), are supporting this evolution. However, the need to move services closer to users to guarantee low latency in the service fruition on one hand, and the trend to support personalization of services on the other, are stimulating the migration of services toward edge nodes (in the so-called “fog computing” fashion). This is the target of the INPUT platform, proposed in the INPUT project to support future Internet personal cloud services in a more scalable and sustainable way, and with innovative added-value capabilities. The INPUT platform enables next-generation cloud applications to go beyond classical service models, and even replaces physical smart devices, usually placed in users’ homes (e.g., set-top-boxes, etc.), with virtual entities, providing them to users “as a Service.” In this paper, we present the INPUT paradigm and discuss a relevant use case—namely, the virtual set-top-box—adopted to prove the feasibility of the softwarized SDN/NFV paradigm jointly with the fog-computing approach for the support of personal cloud services. The INPUT platform is also compared with a legacy approach to evaluate the gain in terms of quality of experience for both static and mobile users.

RSD: Rate-Based Sync Deferment for Personal Cloud Storage Services

Cloud storage services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, to cite a few, are becoming an increasingly “vital” tool in our everyday life. Unluckily, these services can incur large network overhead in different usage scenarios. To reduce it, these systems utilize several techniques, such as source-based deduplication, chunking, delta compression, and so on. One of these techniques is sync deferment, which relies on the packing of updates to intentionally defer the synchronization process for some time, and increase the volume of useful data per overhead byte. The scientific literature has shown this technique to be very helpful, though there are still some limitations on current solutions. To resolve them, we present here a new adaptive sync deferment method, which is comparable to the current state of the art in terms of network overhead, but is also able to minimize the file synchronization time up to 12 times.

A Wireless Monitoring System Using a Tunneling Sensor Array in a Smart Oral Appliance for Sleep Apnea Treatment.

Sleep apnea is a serious sleep disorder, and the most common type is obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Untreated OSA will cause lots of potential health problems. Oral appliance therapy is an effective and popular approach for OSA treatment, but making a perfect fit for each patient is time-consuming and decreases its efficiency considerably. This paper proposes a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) enabled sleep monitoring system in a smart oral appliance, which is capable of intelligently collecting the physiological data about tongue movement through the whole therapy. A tunneling sensor array with an ultra-high sensitivity is incorporated to accurately detect the subtle pressure from the tongue. When the device is placed on the wireless platform, the temporary stored data will be retrieved and wirelessly transmitted to personal computers and cloud storages. The battery will be recharged by harvesting external RF power from the platform. A compact prototype module, whose size is 4.5 × 2.5 × 0.9 cm3, is implemented and embedded inside the oral appliance to demonstrate the tongue movement detection in continuous time frames. The functions of this design are verified by the presented measurement results. This design aims to increase efficiency and make it a total solution for OSA treatment.

Supporting secure keyword search in the personal cloud

The Personal Cloud paradigm has emerged as a solution that allows individuals to manage under their control the collection, usage and sharing of their data. However, by regaining the full control over their data, the users also inherit the burden of protecting it against all forms of attacks and abusive usages. The Secure Personal Cloud architecture relieves the individual from this security task by employing a secure token (i.e., a tamper-resistant hardware device) to control all the sensitive information (e.g., encryption keys, metadata, indexes) and operations (e.g., authentication, data encryption/decryption, access control, and query processing). However, secure tokens are usually equipped with extremely low RAM but have significant Flash storage capacity (Gigabytes), which raises important barriers for embedded data management. This paper presents a new embedded search engine specifically designed for secure tokens, which applies to the important use-case of managing and securing documents in the Personal Cloud context. Conventional search engines privilege either insertion or query scalability but cannot meet both requirements at the same time. Moreover, very few solutions support data deletions and updates in this context. In this paper, we introduce three design principles, namely Write-Once Partitioning, Linear Pipelining and Background Linear Merging, and show how they can be combined to produce an embedded search engine matching the hardware constraints of secure tokens and reconciling high insert/delete/update rate and query scalability. Our experimental results, obtained with a prototype running on a representative hardware platform, demonstrate the scalability of the approach on large datasets and its superiority compared to state of the art methods. Finally, we also discuss the integration of our solution in another important real use-case related to performing information retrieval in smart objects.

IoT embedded linux system based on Raspberry Pi applied to real-time cloud monitoring of a decentralized photovoltaic plant

In this project we propose, describe, implement and test the Renewable Energy Monitoring System (REMS), a new concept on data acquisition and transmission systems (DATS) applied to real-time cloud monitoring of a decentralized photovoltaic (PV) plant. To achieve this latest design, we went through various systems projects alongside the evolution of technology. From this practical experience and in agreement with Brazil’s policy of diversifying the electricity generation matrix, our proposal focuses on a multi-user remote system using Raspberry Pi and Internet of Things (IoT) concept. REMS is capable of sensing and modifying monitoring process management via remote firmware update through the developed Analog/Digital Converter Embedded System (ADCES) as well as communicating with a personal developed cloud server profile via RPi Embedded Linux System (ELS), thus not requiring a dedicated PC. The measured variables are PV voltage and current, ambient and PV module temperature, solar irradiance, and relative humidity.

Critical Factors for Personal Cloud Storage Adoption in China

Abstract Purpose In order to explain and predict the adoption of personal cloud storage, this study explores the critical factors involved in the adoption of personal cloud storage and empirically validates their relationships to a user’s intentions. Design/methodology/approach Based on technology acceptance model (TAM), network externality, trust, and an interview survey, this study proposes a personal cloud storage adoption model. We conducted an empirical analysis by structural equation modeling based on survey data obtained with a questionnaire. Findings Among the adoption factors we identified, network externality has the salient influence on a user’s adoption intention, followed by perceived usefulness, individual innovation, perceived trust, perceived ease of use, and subjective norms. Cloud storage characteristics are the most important indirect factors, followed by awareness to personal cloud storage and perceived risk. However, although perceived risk is regarded as an important factor by other cloud computing researchers, we found that it has no significant influence. Also, subjective norms have no significant influence on perceived usefulness. This indicates that users are rational when they choose whether to adopt personal cloud storage. Research limitations This study ignores time and cost factors that might affect a user’s intention to adopt personal cloud storage. Practical implications Our findings might be helpful in designing and developing personal cloud storage products, and helpful to regulators crafting policies. Originality/value This study is one of the first research efforts that discuss Chinese users’ personal cloud storage adoption, which should help to further the understanding of personal cloud adoption behavior among Chinese users.

Covert Channels in Personal Cloud Storage Services: The Case of Dropbox

Personal storage services are one of the most popular applications based on the cloud computing paradigm. Therefore, the analysis of possible privacy and security issues has been a relevant part of the research agenda. However, threats arising from the adoption of information hiding techniques have been mainly neglected. In this perspective, the paper investigates how personal cloud storage services can be used for building covert channels for stealthy exchange of information through the Internet. To have a realistic use case, we consider the Dropbox application and we present the performance evaluation of two different covert communication methods. To understand the stealthiness of our approach and propose countermeasures, we also investigate some behaviors of Dropbox in a production quality deployment.

Lightweight scheduling for the PRAGMA cloud testbed

SummaryThe Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) is a community of research scientists and institutions from around the Pacific Rim that work together to enable scientific expeditions in areas such as biodiversity distribution and lake ecology. PRAGMA's members collaborate on a testbed infrastructure, and over the past 4 years, the technology focus has shifted to cloud and software defined networking as enabling technologies. This paper describes the design of a web‐based cloud scheduler reservation system that enables users to easily run and manage virtual clusters for their science. Based on a client‐server architecture, the cloud scheduler is designed to require minimal installation and management effort for participating PRAGMA testbed sites. The PRAGMA cloud scheduler is built using a web‐based room reservation tool called Booked and leverages several PRAGMA technologies such as pragma_boot, Personal Cloud Controller, and virtual network overlays (eg, IPOP and ViNe). We discuss our implementation of the pilot cloud scheduler and then describe future work.

A Performance Evaluation of Dropbox in the light of Personal Cloud Storage Systems

A Performance Evaluation of Dropbox in the light of Personal Cloud Storage Systems