Abstract-On the inception of the third millennium, there is much evidence that cloud technologies have become the strategic trend for many governments, not only for developed countries (e.g. the UK, Japan and the USA), but also developing countries (e.g. Malaysia and countries in the Middle East region). These countries have launched cloud computing movements for enhanced standardization of IT resources, cost reduction and more efficient public services. Cloud-based e-government services are considered to be one of the high priorities for government agencies in Jordan. Although experiencing phenomenal evolution, government cloud-services are still suffering from the adoption challenges of e-government initiatives (e.g. technological, human, social and financial aspects) which need to be considered carefully by governments contemplating their implementation. While e-government adoption from the citizens' perspective has been extensively investigated using different theoretical models, these models have not paid adequate attention to security issues. This paper presents a pilot study to investigate citizens' perceptions of the extent to which these challenges inhibit the acceptance and use of cloud computing in the Jordanian public sector and examine the effect of these challenges on the security perceptions of citizens. Based on the analysis of data collected from online surveys, some important challenges were identified. The results can help to guide successful acceptance of cloud-based egovernment services in Jordan.

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Summary Cloud fault tolerance is an important issue in cloud computing platforms and applications. In the event of an unexpected system failure or malfunction, a robust fault‐tolerant design may allow the cloud to continue functioning correctly possibly at a reduced level instead of failing completely. To ensure high availability of critical cloud services, the application execution, and hardware performance, various fault‐tolerant techniques exist for building self‐autonomous cloud systems. In comparison with current approaches, this paper proposes a more robust and reliable architecture using optimal checkpointing strategy to ensure high system availability and reduced system task service finish time. Using pass rates and virtualized mechanisms, the proposed smart failover strategy (SFS) scheme uses components such as cloud fault manager, cloud controller, cloud load balancer, and a selection mechanism, providing fault tolerance via redundancy, optimized selection, and checkpointing. In our approach, the cloud fault manager repairs faults generated before the task time deadline is reached, blocking unrecoverable faulty nodes as well as their virtual nodes. This scheme is also able to remove temporary software faults from recoverable faulty nodes, thereby making them available for future request. We argue that the proposed SFS algorithm makes the system highly fault tolerant by considering forward and backward recovery using diverse software tools. Compared with existing approaches, preliminary experiment of the SFS algorithm indicates an increase in pass rates and a consequent decrease in failure rates, showing an overall good performance in task allocations. We present these results using experimental validation tools with comparison with other techniques, laying a foundation for a fully fault‐tolerant infrastructure as a service cloud environment. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents a comprehensive literature survey and analysis on Phishing, Vishing and Smishing to exploit the knowledge in implementing an intelligent tool for detection and protection. This is a new social engineering problem which makes our day to day life vulnerable and difficult. This investigation particularly focuses on phishing through email as it has more serious consequences directly related to financial transactions in comparison to the other methods. It is worth mentioning that securing the enormous amount of online transactions is very challenging since several methods are invented daily to breach individual privacy in order to steal their credentials. The cost of these types of attacks exceeds millions of dollars annually. Many tools are proposed to solve this problem; unfortunately, the dilemma still exists. This paper proposes a methodology to develop an intelligent tool and awareness security program to address the risk of this problem.fraud and identity theft that result from phishing, pharming and email spoofing of all types.

Despite the widespread success of online banking, there remains a reluctance to use it primarily because of uncertainty and security concerns. This study evaluates the potential of biometric authentication for online banking (bbanking) as a way of improving adoption and use of online banking. To this end, we extend Davis's core TAM model adding self-efficacy and user perceptions of biometric security. Using structural equation modelling techniques, this study revealed that user perceptions of biometrics security positively influenced their attitude and intention to use biometric banking. It also found that self efficacy in biometric use, positively influenced user's perception of the security of biometrics. Index Terms-biometrics, e-banking, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), selfefficacy, biometric banking (b-banking)