Lidia Fotia

Allowing continuous evaluation of citizen opinions through social networks

Implementing concepts like e-governance and e-democracy requires to effectively allow the continuous participation of citizens in decisional processes of the community. In this context, a crucial aspect is the possibility of receiving the opinion of citizens in several situations. To do this, a massive adoption of existing e-voting systems is in fact unfeasible, but the guarantee that the basic security features are supported, is anyway necessary. In this paper, we propose a lightweight e-voting system relying on existing social networks which appears promising for the above applications. Indeed, our proposal solves the trade-off between security and complexity arising from the scenario of continuous opinion evaluation.

A QoS-Aware, Trust-Based Aggregation Model for Grid Federations

In this work we deal with the issue of optimizing the global Quality of Service (QoS) of a Grid Federation by means of an aggregation model specifically designed for intelligent agents assisting Grid nodes. The proposed model relies on an algorithm, called FGF (Friendship and Group Formation), by which the nodes select their partners with the aim of maximizing the QoS they perceive when a computational task requires the collaboration of several Grid nodes. In the proposed solution, in order to assist the selection of the partners, a suitable trust model has been designed. Since jobs sent to Grid Federations hold complex requirements involving well defined resource sets, trust values are calculated for specific sets of resources. We also provide a theoretical foundation and some experiments to prove that, by means of the adoption of the FGF algorithm suitably supported by the proposed trust model, the Grid Capital (which reflect the global QoS) of the Grid Federation is eventually improved.

Privacy-preserving resource evaluation in social networks

In new generation social networks, we expect that the demand of tools allowing the user to effectively control privacy, without relying on the provider trustworthiness, will be more and more increasing. A lot of precious information is currently released by users with no privacy control whenever they evaluate resources, which, for example, is done in Facebook through the “Like Button”. A mechanism allowing the user to express her preferences fully preserving her privacy is thus desired, especially if it is able to protect user privacy also in case of untrustworthy social network provider. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem, based on a DHT-based P2P social network and on a cryptographic protocol relying on partially blind digital signatures. The protocol is shown to be a solution to the trade-off between feasibility and security, since it guarantees the needed security requirements without including the complex features of existing e-voting systems.

Social Signature: Signing by Tweeting

In many application contexts, qualified electronic signature appears difficult to be adopted both for the cost of smart cards and qualified certificates and for the complexity of the signing, verification, registration and certificate management.However, the European legislation allows us to use electronic signatures when application scope of the signature is limited. As a consequence, designing new signature protocols that relax the heaviest features of qualified electronic signature in favor of usability and cheapness is a timely and important issue. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight e-signature protocol with a good level of security, not using public key cryptography and dedicated devices. The protocol is conceived for closed domains of users, such as the case of document exchanges between citizens and municipal public offices or private companies and employees. According to the protocol, signature functions are spread out over the popular social network Twitter, without requiring changes of its features, so that the adoption of our solution appears both realistic and effective.

Forming Homogeneous Classes for e-Learning in a Social Network Scenario

The use of network technology to provide online courses is the latest trend in the training and development industry and has been defined as the “e-Learning revolution”. On the other hand, Online Social Networks (OSNs) represent today an effective possibility to have common and easy-to-use platforms for supporting e-Learning activities. However, as underlined by previous studies, many of the proposed e-Learning systems can result in confusion and decrease the learner’s interest. In this paper, we introduce the possibility to form e-Learning classes in the context of OSNs. At the best of our knowledge, any of the approaches proposed in the past considers the evolution of on-line classes as a problem of matching the individual users’ profiles with the profiles of the classes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that exploits a multi-agent system to suitably distribute such a matching computation on all the user devices. The good effectiveness and the promising efficiency of our approach is shown by the experimental results obtained on simulated On-line Social Networks data.

Allowing Non-identifying Information Disclosure in Citizen Opinion Evaluation

The continuous participation of citizens in the decisional processes of the community through the submission of their opinions is a key factor of e-democracy. To do this, it appears very promising the use of lightweight e-voting systems relying on existing social networks, as a good way to solve the trade-off among security, usability and scalability requirements. Among the other security features, anonymity of citizens i.e., secreteness should be guaranteed, at least to be sure that the action of people is actually free from conditioning. However, the decisional process would be better driven if the opinions of citizens were mapped to social, economic, working, personal, non-identifying attributes. In this paper, by extending a previous solution working on existing social networks, we overcome the above limit by re-interpreting the classical concept of secreteness in such a way that a preference expressed by a citizen can be related to a number of certified attributes chosen by the citizen herself, yet keeping her anonymity.

A Reputation-Based Approach to Improve QoS in Cloud Service Composition

Cloud Computing is a versatile computing paradigm capable of attracting a wide variety of applications. However, the necessity to provide a wide range of complex services led providers to establish mutual agreements to provide large-scale distributed multi-cloud environments. Providers gain the opportunity to compose service workflows that are effective and efficient, taking resources of their own competitors, and the capability to satisfy unexpected workload peaks. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based model aiming at supporting the service composition by considering measures of QoS collected by the measuring systems, and reputation measures collected with the customers by means of users feedback.

Enhancing Public Digital Identity System (SPID) to Prevent Information Leakage

Public Digital Identity System (SPID) is the Italian government framework compliant with the EU eIDAS regulatory environment, aimed at implementing electronic identification and trust services in e-government and business applications. According to this federated identity management framework, digital identities are issued, upon application of the interested party, by digital identity providers. This way, users authenticate to service providers, which are public or private organizations providing a service to authorized users, provided that they adhere to SPID. A drawback that could limit the real diffusion of this framework is that, despite the fact that identity and service providers might be competitor private companies, SPID authentication results in information leakage about customers of identity providers. To overcome this potential limitation, in this paper, we propose a modification of SPID to allow user authentication by preserving the anonymity of the identity provider that grants the authentication credentials. This way, information leakage about customers of identity providers is fully prevented.

A New Approach for Electronic Signature

There are many application contexts in which guaranteeing authenticity and integrity of documents is essential. In these cases, the typical solution relies on digital signature, which is based on the use of a PKI infrastructure and suitable devices (smart card or token USB). For several reasons, including certificate and device cost, many countries, such as the United States, the European Union, India, Brazil and Australia, have introduced the possibility to use simple generic electronic signature , which is less secure but reduces the drawbacks of digital signature.In this paper, we propose a new type of electronic signature that is based on the use of social networks. We formalize the proposal in a generic scenario and then, show a possible implementation on Twitter. Our proposal is proved to be secure, cheap and simple to adopt.

Using Semantic Negotiation for Ontology Enrichment in e-Learning Multi-agent Systems

In this work, we propose an algorithm, called E-Learning Ontology Enrichment (ELOE), to derive a global representation from the personal ontologies of different agents present in an e-Learning MAS. Using ELOE, each agent of a MAS-based e-Learning system can autonomously enrich its own ontology by using semantic negotiation and, at the same time, it can access to the global ontology to have a view of the terms used by all the other agents. Each term of the global ontology is associated with a set of meanings, and each meaning is associated with the set of agents that have used it. This way an agent, having to send a message to an interlocutor, is able of choosing from the global ontology the most suitable term with the most appropriate meaning. Only if the agent does not find in the global ontology the appropriate term, it will use a personal term that probably will lead to a new semantic negotiation process. This way, the use of the onerous task of the semantic negotiation will be limited to only the strictly necessary situations, and consequently the whole communication cost is decreased.