Ivanytsia O.V.

National mining university, Ukraine

Problems of confidence in computing

Information and communication technologies, along with society's drive for collaboration in the modern world, make "collaborative computing'' and its applications possible and even necessary. Trust in such an environment will eventually determine its success and popularity due to people's desire for privacy, integrity and reliability. Today's Internet and existing networks are not trust-oriented in design and might be compromised by many untrustworthy factors, such as hackers, viruses, spam, faults, and system failures. Compared to the two-part interaction model (i.e. the client-server service model), collaborative computing environments are group-oriented. Involve a large number of users and shared resources, and are complex, dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous. These factors offer a good environment for hostile elements to lurk. Besides the previously mentioned untrustworthy factors, collaborative computing environments suffer from dangerous attacks by malicious internal members. Those problems restrain full utilization of the computer systems in collaborative computing. The trusted and secure collaborative computing is one of the objectives for the next generation of the Internet, which is trustworthy and security-oriented.

This article summarizes the authors' and other researchers' efforts to develop such a trusted environment that possesses high security and reliability for the collaborative computing. The important modules composing the trusted and secure computing environment are elaborated, including secure group communication. The monograph also discusses security and reliability in grid computing. One typical collaborative computing application is medical practice and healthcare research based on medical information systems.

Information and communication technologies, along with society's drive for collaboration in the modern world, make collaborative computing and its applications possible and necessary. Typical collaborative computing applications include, but are not limited to multi-party military actions, teleconferencing, medicine, interactive and collaborative decision making, grid-computing, information distribution, and pay per view services. Trust in such an environment can eventually determine its success and popularity due to the corporate and humans desire for confidentiality and integrity of their personal and/or shared information. The current Internet is not security-oriented by design. Security patches and more powerful computing/storage resources available to hackers may result in more security vulnerabilities. Compared to the two-party interaction model (such as the client-server service model), collaborative computing environments are group-oriented, involve a large number of entities and shared resources, are complex, dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous and may possibly even include hostile elements. Systems experience failures due to internal falls and external attacks from hostile entities. In addition, there is the problem of insider threats, by which attacks are from malicious parties inside the organizations or members of collaborative computing groups. Consequently, building a trusted collaborative computing environment is very difficult and requires a long term persevering endeavor.

The theme of trusted collaborative computing is to make collaborative computing environments and applications highly secure and dependable and be able to not only protect systems against components failures but also defend against external attacks, even the attacks from internal malicious users. Trusted collaborative computing will be able to not only migrate traditional collaborative computing applications from untrustworthy environments to a secure and reliable platform, but also provide security guarantee/services for new emerging collaborative computing applications. From the technical point of view, trusted collaborative computing would encompass both security and reliability and seek the seamless integration of advanced security and reliability technologies.

Trusted collaborative computing environments are characterized by collaborative tasks which require multiple entities to work together and share their resources. The first key issue in this environment is that multiple participating entities must communicate securely among one another. IP multicast provides efficient transmission of messages to a group of users; however, the open nature of IP multicast makes it unable to provide strong confidentiality. Secure group-oriented communication is the first fundamental function for trusted collaborative computing. Another key requirement is related to resource sharing and data exchange. Thus selective group-oriented communication is the first fundamental function for trusted collaborative computing. Access to shared resources/data must be finely controlled: otherwise attackers and malicious users can access resources to which they are not entitled to access, abuse, tamper, and even damage the resources. Thus selective data sharing, at different granularity levels and along with access control, becomes another fundamental function. These two classes of fundamental functions should be sufficiently flexible in supporting various possible forms of interactive access relations between the parties and the resources in the system. Consequently, we can identify four fundamental security requirements for trusted collaborative computing: secure group communication.

As is well known, key management is the most important yet difficult issue in such context. How to generate, distribute, update, and revoke keys in large and dynamic environments is an important challenge.

Intrusion is a very serious security problem in computing and communication systems. Intruding attacks, such as Denial of Services (DoS) are easily launched but very difficult to defend. Such attacks exist in collaborative computing environments without doubt, moreover, they are more serious in collaborative computing environments because the attacks can be launched by internal malicious users and/or the collusion among internal users and/or external attackers. Knowing intrusion attacks and becoming familiar with intrusion detection and defense technologies are crucial for designing and implementing trusted collaborative computing environments. Reliability is a coherent requirement and feature of trusted collaborative computing. A fault or failure from any part/component of trusted collaborative computing environments would degrade the performance of the systems and affect multiple party collaboration and interaction: furthermore, it may have serious consequences. For example, it could be potentially disastrous if a patient's records fail to be loaded due to system failures and they are unavailable in the event of a life-threatening emergency. Grid computing is a recently developed technology for complex systems with large-scale resource sharing, wide-area communication, and multi-institutional collaboration. It could become a potential platform hosting trusted collaborative computing framework and applications. The medical information system is a typical collaborative computing application in which physicians, nurses, professors, researchers, health insurance personnel, etc. share patient information (including text, images, multimedia data) and collaboratively conduct critical tasks via the networked system. On one hand, people would be willing to step into the medical information system age only when their privacy and integrity can be protected and guaranteed within medical information system systems. On the other hand, only secure and reliable medical information system systems would provide safe and solid medical and health care services to people.

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2. Jeff Shapiro. Collaborative Computing: Multimedia Across the Network. – “Yale University Press”, 2006. -302 p.:img.

3. Philip Miller. LAN Technologies Explained. – “Springer”, 2007. 1379 p.:img.