On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet

Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed workflow environment

Open Source Software in Complex Domains: Current Perceptions in the Embedded Systems Area

With Nokia’s 770 and N800 Internet Tablets heavily utilising Open Source software, it is timely to ask whether – and if so to what extent – Open Source has made ingress into complex application domains such as embedded systems. In this paper we report on a qualitative study of perceptions of Open Source software in the secondary software sector, and in particular companies deploying embedded software. Although the sector is historically associated in Open Source software studies with uptake of embedded Linux, we find broader acceptance. The level of reasoning about Open Source quality and trust issues found was commensurate with that expressed in the literature. The classical strengths of Open Source, namely mass inspection, ease of conducting trials, longevity and source code access for debugging, were at the forefront of thinking. However, there was an acknowledgement that more guidelines were needed for assessing and incorporating Open Source software in products

PCD

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Page 96 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-95).The security of systems can often be expressed as ensuring that some property is maintained at every step of a distributed computation conducted by untrusted parties. Special cases include integrity of programs running on untrusted platforms, various forms of confidentiality and side-channel resilience, and domain-specific invariants. We propose a new approach, proof-carrying data (PCD), which sidesteps the threat of faults and leakage by reasoning about properties of a computation's output data, regardless of the process that produced it. In PCD, the system designer prescribes the desired properties of a computation's outputs. Corresponding proofs are attached to every message flowing through the system, and are mutually verified by the system's components. Each such proof attests that the message's data and all of its history comply with the prescribed properties. We construct a general protocol compiler that generates, propagates, and verifies such proofs of compliance, while preserving the dynamics and efficiency of the original computation. Our main technical tool is the cryptographic construction of short non-interactive arguments (computationally-sound proofs) for statements whose truth depends on "hearsay evidence": previous arguments about other statements. To this end, we attain a particularly strong proof-of-knowledge property. We realize the above, under standard cryptographic assumptions, in a model where the prover has blackbox access to some simple functionality - essentially, a signature card.by Alessandro Chiesa.M.Eng

Spartan Daily, September 15, 2003

Volume 121, Issue 12https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9878/thumbnail.jp

December 6, 2010 University Chronicle

Shawnee State University Student Newspaperhttps://digitalcommons.shawnee.edu/chronicle/1103/thumbnail.jp

Formally Verified Verifiable Electronic Voting Scheme

Since the introduction of secret ballots in Victoria, Australia in 1855, paper (ballots) are widely used around the world to record the preferences of eligible voters. Paper ballots provide three important ingredients: correctness, privacy, and verifiability. However, the paper ballot election brings various other challenges, e.g. it is slow for large democracies like India, error prone for complex voting method like single transferable vote, and poses operational challenges for large countries like Australia. In order to solve these problems and various others, many countries are adopting electronic voting. However, electronic voting has a whole new set of problems. In most cases, the software programs used to conduct the election have numerous problems, including, but not limited to, counting bugs, ballot identification, etc. Moreover, these software programs are treated as commercial in confidence and are not allowed to be inspected by members of the public. As a consequence, the result produced by these software programs can not be substantiated. In this thesis, we address the three main concerns posed by electronic voting, i.e. correctness, privacy, and verifiability. We address the correctness concern by using theorem prover to implement the vote counting algorithm, privacy concern by using cryptography, and verifiability concern by generating a independently checkable scrutiny sheet (certificate). Our work has been carried out in the Coq theorem prover