Tacit knowledge and the biological weapons regime

Bioterrorism has become increasingly salient in security discourse in part because of perceived changes in the capacity and geography of life science research. Yet its salience is founded upon a framing of changes in science and security that does not always take into consideration the somewhat slippery concept of ‘tacit knowledge’, something poorly understood, disparately conceptualised and often marginalised in discussions on state and non-state biological weapons programmes. This paper looks at how changes in science and technology—particularly the evolution of information and communications technology—has contributed to the partial erosion of aspects of tacit knowledge and the implications for the biological weapons regime. This paper concludes by arguing that the marginalisation of tacit knowledge weakens our understanding of the difficulties encountered in biological weapons programmes and can result in distorted perceptions of the threat posed by dual-use biotechnology in the 21st century

A framework for analyzing RFID distance bounding protocols

Many distance bounding protocols appropriate for the RFID technology have been proposed recently. Unfortunately, they are commonly designed without any formal approach, which leads to inaccurate analyzes and unfair comparisons. Motivated by this need, we introduce a unied framework that aims to improve analysis and design of distance bounding protocols. Our framework includes a thorough terminology about the frauds, adversary, and prover, thus disambiguating many misleading terms. It also explores the adversary's capabilities and strategies, and addresses the impact of the prover's ability to tamper with his device. It thus introduces some new concepts in the distance bounding domain as the black-box and white-box models, and the relation between the frauds with respect to these models. The relevancy and impact of the framework is nally demonstrated on a study case: Munilla-Peinado distance bounding protocol

Extending Globus to support Multicast Transmission

Proceedings of the 2004 UK e-Science All hands Meeting, 31st August - 3rd September, Nottingham UKThe Globus Toolkit is an open source software toolkit that has become the de-facto standard for middleware used to build Grid services. Globus XIO is an eXtensible Input/Output library for Globus. It provides a POSIX-like API to swappable I/O implementations - essentially "I/O plugins" for Globus. TCP-XM is a modified TCP engine that supports multicast transmission. We have taken this protocol and wrapped it using XIO to extend the Globus Toolkit to support multicast transmission. This paper describes the implementation and operation of our Globus XIO multicast transport driver. It provides an overview of the TCP-XM protocol design, and describes some initial experimental results

A comprehensive survey of wireless body area networks on PHY, MAC, and network layers solutions

Recent advances in microelectronics and integrated circuits, system-on-chip design, wireless communication and intelligent low-power sensors have allowed the realization of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN is a collection of low-power, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive lightweight wireless sensor nodes that monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. In addition, it supports a number of innovative and interesting applications such as ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, interactive gaming, and military applications. In this paper, the fundamental mechanisms of WBAN including architecture and topology, wireless implant communication, low-power Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols are reviewed. A comprehensive study of the proposed technologies for WBAN at Physical (PHY), MAC, and Network layers is presented and many useful solutions are discussed for each layer. Finally, numerous WBAN applications are highlighted

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities

Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and loads. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In particular, we focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can be applied to energy management. Finally, we also discuss the coordinated standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and protocols.Comment: To be published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial