In the Realm of Intellectual Property: Cyber Fraud as a Major Challenge to the Copyright Protection in Nigeria

Copyright, the importance of copyright to Nation’s economy, the efforts of the Nigeria copyright laws and Copyright Commission to combat breach of Copyright is a crucial issue, all over the world and it is even more a crucial subject in Nigeria. For years now, Nigeria has depended majorly on physical natural resources as the mainstay of the nation’s economy which is no more reliable as it used to be the case. It is high time for copyright work to be properly managed for maximum economic benefit in Nigeria. As the World is growing in terms of technology, and with the advent of internet a lot of fraud are been perpetrated at the internet that is frustrating authors and creators of a work, copyright infringement abound on the internet. This work will therefore examine copyright and piracy in Nigeria and more importantly the threat posed to copyright owners at the internet and concludes with suggestions and recommendations on the ways to combat the menace. Keywords: intellectual property, copyright, cyber fraud and pirac

Fundamental Design Issues in Anonymous Peer-to-peer Distributed Hash Table Protocols

Ph.D

Dotació d'anonimat a plataforma JXTA

En aquest projecte es presenta un mecanisme per a dotar d'anonimat a la missatgeria de JXTA. El sistema desenvolupat permet enviar missatges anònims i respondre a aquests, mantenint l'anonimat dels peers comunicants de cara a la resta. El mecanisme passa inadvertit de cara al receptor d'un missatge anònim però, en canvi, no és transparent de cara a l'emissor. El mecanisme es basa en una adaptació del protocol OnionRouting i es desplega a JXTA com un servei. Cada peer corre el seu propi servei i aquests col·laboren entre sí per a re-dirigir els missatges obtenint, així, anonimat

A Taxonomy for and Analysis of Anonymous Communications Networks

Any entity operating in cyberspace is susceptible to debilitating attacks. With cyber attacks intended to gather intelligence and disrupt communications rapidly replacing the threat of conventional and nuclear attacks, a new age of warfare is at hand. In 2003, the United States acknowledged that the speed and anonymity of cyber attacks makes distinguishing among the actions of terrorists, criminals, and nation states difficult. Even President Obama’s Cybersecurity Chief-elect recognizes the challenge of increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Now through April 2009, the White House is reviewing federal cyber initiatives to protect US citizen privacy rights. Indeed, the rising quantity and ubiquity of new surveillance technologies in cyberspace enables instant, undetectable, and unsolicited information collection about entities. Hence, anonymity and privacy are becoming increasingly important issues. Anonymization enables entities to protect their data and systems from a diverse set of cyber attacks and preserves privacy. This research provides a systematic analysis of anonymity degradation, preservation and elimination in cyberspace to enhance the security of information assets. This includes discovery/obfuscation of identities and actions of/from potential adversaries. First, novel taxonomies are developed for classifying and comparing well-established anonymous networking protocols. These expand the classical definition of anonymity and capture the peer-to-peer and mobile ad hoc anonymous protocol family relationships. Second, a unique synthesis of state-of-the-art anonymity metrics is provided. This significantly aids an entity’s ability to reliably measure changing anonymity levels; thereby, increasing their ability to defend against cyber attacks. Finally, a novel epistemic-based mathematical model is created to characterize how an adversary reasons with knowledge to degrade anonymity. This offers multiple anonymity property representations and well-defined logical proofs to ensure the accuracy and correctness of current and future anonymous network protocol design

A mutual anonymous peer-to-peer protocol design

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has become a popular application model because of its easy resource sharing pattern and powerful query search scheme. However, decentralized P2P architecture is scarcely seen to deploy the anonymity on its peers. In this paper, we propose a mutual anonymity protocol, called Secret-sharing-based Mutual Anonymity Protocol (SSMP), for decentralized P2P systems. SSMP employs Shamirs ’ secret sharing scheme to allow peers to issue queries and responders to deliver requested files anonymously. Compared with previous designs, SSMP achieves mutual anonymity in P2P systems with a high degree of anonymity and a low cryptography processing overhead. We evaluate SSMP by comprehensive simulations. 1

Private and censorship-resistant communication over public networks

Society’s increasing reliance on digital communication networks is creating unprecedented opportunities for wholesale surveillance and censorship. This thesis investigates the use of public networks such as the Internet to build robust, private communication systems that can resist monitoring and attacks by powerful adversaries such as national governments. We sketch the design of a censorship-resistant communication system based on peer-to-peer Internet overlays in which the participants only communicate directly with people they know and trust. This ‘friend-to-friend’ approach protects the participants’ privacy, but it also presents two significant challenges. The first is that, as with any peer-to-peer overlay, the users of the system must collectively provide the resources necessary for its operation; some users might prefer to use the system without contributing resources equal to those they consume, and if many users do so, the system may not be able to survive. To address this challenge we present a new game theoretic model of the problem of encouraging cooperation between selfish actors under conditions of scarcity, and develop a strategy for the game that provides rational incentives for cooperation under a wide range of conditions. The second challenge is that the structure of a friend-to-friend overlay may reveal the users’ social relationships to an adversary monitoring the underlying network. To conceal their sensitive relationships from the adversary, the users must be able to communicate indirectly across the overlay in a way that resists monitoring and attacks by other participants. We address this second challenge by developing two new routing protocols that robustly deliver messages across networks with unknown topologies, without revealing the identities of the communication endpoints to intermediate nodes or vice versa. The protocols make use of a novel unforgeable acknowledgement mechanism that proves that a message has been delivered without identifying the source or destination of the message or the path by which it was delivered. One of the routing protocols is shown to be robust to attacks by malicious participants, while the other provides rational incentives for selfish participants to cooperate in forwarding messages