Le mentorat entrepreneurial est une forme d'accompagnement des entrepreneurs novices par des entrepreneurs plus expérimentés. Les premières recherches sur ce sujet ont essentiellement été concernées par la relation dyadique entre le mentor et le mentoré. Notre travail propose une vision intégrée de ce processus d'accompagnement dans sa dimension tripartite qui prend en compte le rôle de l'organisation tierce initiatrice du programme. Pour construire une modélisation synthétique du processus de mentorat entrepreneurial, nous mobilisons la méthode des cas pour effectuer une première analyse comparative des fonctions de l'organisation tierce dans sept programmes de mentorat en France. Cette analyse nous renseigne d'abord sur les huit fonctions de l'organisation tierce et leur impact sur la qualité de la relation de mentorat et le processus d'apprentissage des participants. La confrontation détaillée de ces résultats nous conduit finalement à proposer un modèle d'efficacité de la relation tripartite de mentorat entrepreneurial / Entrepreneurial mentoring is a developmental relationship between an experienced entrepreneur and a novice entrepreneur. Research is still at its infancy on this subject and it is difficult to find a holistic and unified view of the mentoring process. We are missing this integrated and robust vision and it is our aim in this research to propose one. In a formal entrepreneurial mentoring programme, the relationship is tripartite between the entrepreneur-mentor, the entrepreneur-mentee and the third party organisation initiating the programme. To construct a synthetic model of the mentoring process, we use the case study method for a comparative analysis of seven French entrepreneurial mentoring programmes. We analyse the eight functions of the third party and their impact on the quality of the relationship as well as the participants' learning process. Confronting all these results has enabled us to construct an efficiency model for the tripartite relationship of entrepreneurial mentoring

Trust in information systems stem from two key properties of responses to queries regarding the state of the system, viz., i) authoritativeness, and ii) unbiasedness. That the response is authoritative implies that i) the provider (source) of the response, and ii) the chain of delegations through which the provider obtained the authority to respond, can be verified. The property of unbiasedness implies that no system data relevant to the query is deliberately or accidentally suppressed. The need for guaranteeing these two important properties stem from the impracticality for the verifier to exhaustively verify the correctness of every system process, and the integrity of the platform on which system processes are executed. For instance, the integrity of a process may be jeopardized by i) bugs (attacks) in computing hardware like Random Access Memory (RAM), input/output channels (I/O), and Central Processing Unit( CPU), ii) exploitable defects in an operating system, iii) logical bugs in program implementation, and iv) a wide range of other embedded malfunctions, among others. A first step in ensuing AU properties of geographic queries is the need to ensure AU responses to a specific type of geographic query, viz., point-location. The focus of this dissertation is on strategies to leverage assured point-location, for i) ensuring authoritativeness and unbiasedness (AU) of responses to a wide range of geographic queries; and ii) useful applications like Secure Queryable Dynamic Maps (SQDM) and trustworthy redistricting protocol. The specific strategies used for guaranteeing AU properties of geographic services include i) use of novel Merkle-hash tree- based data structures, and ii) blockchain networks to guarantee the integrity of the processes.

Ce travail doctoral est une contribution à la compréhension des effets des labels lorsqu’ils sont associés aux marques. Il s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux effets des labels sur la qualité perçue par le consommateur, les relations à la marque et le consentement à payer. La définition de la qualité et la désignation des instances en charge de sa normalisation sont des problématiques historiques dont on retrouve les traces tant dans les principes du droit romain que chez les théologiens médiévistes et, plus récemment, au cœur de la distinction théorique entre les biens ou les attributs de recherche, d’expérience et de croyance. La thèse aspire à dépasser la dyade marque-acheteur. Elle considère que la qualité ne peut être garantie par le seul offreur dans certaines circonstances. Nous inscrivons notre modélisation dans le cadre des enseignements des recherches sur le capital-marque et nous appuyons sur la théorie économique du signal. Les labels, en tant qu’émanation de l’action d’un tiers de confiance permettent de réduire l’asymétrie informationnelle facteur essentiel de la difficulté à estimer la qualité. Le design de notre expérience repose sur un plan factoriel complet de type 4 × 4 (quatre marques, sans label et trois types de label) en inter-sujets. Au total, 1005 acheteurs de marques d’un produit agroalimentaire de grande consommation ont été interrogés sur internet et en face-à-face. Les qualités psychométriques des instruments de mesure sont vérifiées, les interactions entre marque et label sont étudiées par les chemins de causalité et la mesure du consentement à payer est formalisée par une zone d’acceptabilité du prix. Un effet direct du label sur les variables dépendantes est constaté mais lorsque la marque est prise en compte cet effet disparait, mettant ainsi en évidence une médiation totale par la marque. Des effets indirects de médiation en chaîne sont également mesurés, différents d’un label à l’autre et selon la marque à laquelle ils sont associés. Nos résultats conduisent à donner avec prudence de l’importance aux stratégies d’association d’une marque et d’un label. / This doctoral work is a contribution to understand the effects of third-party seals when they are associated with brands. It focuses more precisely on their effects on the perceived quality, the relationship to brand and the willingness to pay. The determination of the quality and the designation of who is revealing it are historical issues which the foundations can be found in the principles of the Roman law, among the theologians medievalists and more recently in the heart of the theoretical distinction between research, experience and credence goods or characteristics. This thesis led to exceed the brand-buyer dyad and consider that the quality cannot be guaranteed by the single buyer, under certain circumstances. We took anchor on the signal theory with reference to research on brand equity. The third-party seals, as a consequence of the action of a trusted third party, can reduce information asymmetries linked to the difficulty to estimate the quality. Our experience is based on a 4 × 4 between-subjects full factorial design (four brands, without label and three types of third-party seals). A sample of 1005 buyers of a fast-moving consumer good was asked on the internet and face-to-face. The psychometric qualities of the measuring instruments are verified, brand-label interactions are studied by the path analysis and the extent of the willingness to pay is formalized by a zone of price acceptability. A direct effect of third-party seals on dependent variable is measured, but when the brand is taken into account this effect disappears, highlighting a total mediation by the brand. Indirect effects of serial multiple mediation are also underlined; the results differ from one third-party seal to another and depending on the brand to which they are associated. Our results lead to give with caution the importance to the association of a brand with a third-party seal.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a subclass of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in which the mobile nodes are vehicles; these vehicles are autonomous systems connected by wireless communication on a peer-to-peer basis. They are self-organized, self-configured and self-controlled infrastructure-less networks. This kind of network has the advantage of being able to be set-up and deployed anywhere and anytime because it has no infrastructure set-up and no central administration. Distributing information between these vehicles over long ranges in such networks, however, is a very challenging task, since sharing information always has a risk attached to it especially when the information is confidential. The disclosure of such information to anyone else other than the intended parties could be extremely damaging, particularly in military applications where controlling the dissemination of messages is essential. This thesis therefore provides a review of the issue of security in VANET and MANET; it also surveys existing solutions for dissemination control. It highlights a particular area not adequately addressed until now: controlling information flow in VANETs. This thesis contributes a policy-based framework to control the dissemination of messages communicated between nodes in order to ensure that message remains confidential not only during transmission, but also after it has been communicated to another peer, and to keep the message contents private to an originator-defined subset of nodes in the VANET. This thesis presents a novel framework to control data dissemination in vehicle ad hoc networks in which policies are attached to messages as they are sent between peers. This is done by automatically attaching policies along with messages to specify how the information can be used by the receiver, so as to prevent disclosure of the messages other than consistent with the requirements of the originator. These requirements are represented as a set of policy rules that explicitly instructs recipients how the information contained in messages can be disseminated to other nodes in order to avoid unintended disclosure. This thesis describes the data dissemination policy language used in this work; and further describes the policy rules in order to be a suitable and understandable language for the framework to ensure the confidentiality requirement of the originator. This thesis also contributes a policy conflict resolution that allows the originator to be asked for up-to-date policies and preferences. The framework was evaluated using the Network Simulator (NS-2) to provide and check whether the privacy and confidentiality of the originators’ messages were met. A policy-based agent protocol and a new packet structure were implemented in this work to manage and enforce the policies attached to packets at every node in the VANET. Some case studies are presented in this thesis to show how data dissemination can be controlled based on the policy of the originator. The results of these case studies show the feasibility of our research to control the data dissemination between nodes in VANETs. NS-2 is also used to test the performance of the proposed policy-based agent protocol and demonstrate its effectiveness using various network performance metrics (average delay and overhead).

Portable languages and distributed paradigms have driven a wave of new applications and processing models. One of the most promising, certainly from its early marketing, but disappointing (from its limited uptake)is the mobile agent execution and data processing model. Mobile agents are autonomous programs which can move around a heterogeneous network such as the Internet, crossing through a number of different security domains, and perform some work at each visited destination as partial completion of a mission for their agent user. Despite their promise as a technology and paradigm to drive global electronic services (i.e.any Internet-driven-and-delivered service, not solely e-commerce related activities), their up take on the Internet has been very limited. Chief among the reasons for the paradigm's practical under-achievement is there is no ubiquitous frame work for using Internet mobile agents, and non-trivial security concerns abound for the two major stake holders (mobile agent users and mobile agent platform owners). While both stake holders have security concerns with the dangers of the mobile agent processing model, most investigators in the field are of the opinion that protecting mobile agents from malicious agent platforms is more problematic than protecting agent platforms from malicious mobile agents. Traditional cryptographic mechanisms are not well-suited to counter the bulk of the threats associated with the mobile agent paradigm due to the untrusted hosting of an agent and its intended autonomous, flexible movement and processing. In our investigation, we identified that the large majority of the research undertaken on mobile agent security to date has taken a micro-level perspective. By this we mean research focused solely on either of the two major stakeholders, and even then often only on improving measures to address one security issue dear to the stake holder - for example mobile agent privacy (for agent users) or access control to platform resources (for mobile agent platform owners). We decided to take a more encompassing, higher-level approach in tackling mobile agent security issues. In this endeavour, we developed the beginnings of an infrastructural-approach to not only reduce the security concerns of both major stakeholders, but bring them transparently to a working relationship. Strategic utilisation of both existing distributed system trusted-third parties (TTPs) and novel mobile agent paradigm-specific TTPs are fundamental in the infrastructural framework we have devised. Besides designing an application and language independent frame work for supporting a large-scale Internet mobile agent network, our Mobile Agent Secure Hub Infrastructure (MASHIn) proposal encompasses support for flexible access control to agent platform resources. A reliable means to track the location and processing times of autonomous Internet mobile agents is discussed, withfault-tolerant handling support to work around unexpected processing delays. Secure,highly-effective (incomparison to existing mechanisms) strategies for providing mobile agent privacy, execution integrity, and stake holder confidence scores were devised - all which fit comfortably within the MASHIn framework. We have deliberately considered the interests - withoutbias -of both stake holders when designing our solutions. In relation to mobile agent execution integrity, we devised a new criteria for assessing the robustness of existing execution integrity schemes. Whilst none of the existing schemes analysed met a large number of our desired properties for a robust scheme, we identified that the objectives of Hohl's reference states scheme were most admirable - particularly real - time in - mission execution integrity checking. Subsequently, we revised Hohl's reference states protocols to fit in the MASHIn framework, and were able to overcome not only the two major limitations identified in his scheme, but also meet all of our desired properties for a robust execution integrity scheme (given an acceptable decrease in processing effiency). The MASHIn offers a promising new perspective for future mobile agent security research and indeed a new frame work for enabling safe and autonomous Internet mobile agents. Just as an economy cannot thrive without diligent care given to micro and macro-level issues, we do not see the security prospects of mobile agents (and ultimately the prospects of the mobile agent paradigm) advancing without diligent research on both levels.