Trustworthy Knowledge Planes For Federated Distributed Systems

In federated distributed systems, such as the Internet and the public cloud, the constituent systems can differ in their configuration and provisioning, resulting in significant impacts on the performance, robustness, and security of applications. Yet these systems lack support for distinguishing such characteristics, resulting in uninformed service selection and poor inter-operator coordination. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a trustworthy knowledge plane that can determine such characteristics about autonomous networks on the Internet. A knowledge plane collects the state of network devices and participants. Using this state, applications infer whether a network possesses some characteristic of interest. The knowledge plane uses attestation to attribute state descriptions to the principals that generated them, thereby making the results of inference more trustworthy. Trustworthy knowledge planes enable applications to establish stronger assumptions about their network operating environment, resulting in improved robustness and reduced deployment barriers. We have prototyped the knowledge plane and associated devices. Experience with deploying analyses over production networks demonstrate that knowledge planes impose low cost and can scale to support Internet-scale networks

Trustworthy Knowledge Planes For Federated Distributed Systems

In federated distributed systems, such as the Internet and the public cloud, the constituent systems can differ in their configuration and provisioning, resulting in significant impacts on the performance, robustness, and security of applications. Yet these systems lack support for distinguishing such characteristics, resulting in uninformed service selection and poor inter-operator coordination. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a trustworthy knowledge plane that can determine such characteristics about autonomous networks on the Internet. A knowledge plane collects the state of network devices and participants. Using this state, applications infer whether a network possesses some characteristic of interest. The knowledge plane uses attestation to attribute state descriptions to the principals that generated them, thereby making the results of inference more trustworthy. Trustworthy knowledge planes enable applications to establish stronger assumptions about their network operating environment, resulting in improved robustness and reduced deployment barriers. We have prototyped the knowledge plane and associated devices. Experience with deploying analyses over production networks demonstrate that knowledge planes impose low cost and can scale to support Internet-scale networks

INTERNAL AUDIT CHARACTERISTICS AND QUALITY OF ACCOUNTING INFORMATION IN NIGERIA

The basic goal of Accounting is to provide enabling accounting information for reliable decision-making. The quality level of this accounting information comes from the company's governance practices, thereby emphasizing the importance of corporate governance in companies. Recently, following the financial crises resulting in accounting scandals, attention has been moving towards Internal Audit Function as an important factor in the structure of Corporate Governance. This paper therefore examined the extent of the relationship between internal audit function and the quality of accounting information of companies. The study adopted the Survey research design. The research instrument employed was Questionnaire which was administered to internal auditors of the “Big Four”. Linear regression analysis was employed in the analysis of the data collected with the use of Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS). The results revealed that there is a significant relationship between the internal audit characteristics and the quality of accounting information. It was recommended that in order to provide credibility to the financial statement, there should be a law in place mandating attachment of internal auditors report to the financial statemen

Strategies of disarmament: civil society and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty

1Dottorato di ricerca in Political Theory (XXVIII ciclo), LUISS Guido Carli, Roma, 2017. Tutor: Prof. Raffaele Marchetti, Prof. Stuart Croft. PhD School on Globalisation, the EU and Multilateralism - GEM (III generazione). PhD in partnership con la Warwick University, Department of Politics and International Studies.openThis thesis explores the ideological bases of the global governance of nuclear weapons by analysing the role of civil society, an actor generally left aside by nuclear scholarship. Here the question of nuclear order is tackled with an unconventional approach that combines critical works in nuclear studies, critical constructivist works on security, and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of civil society. Such approach brings civil society to the forefront of analytical attention in order to show the cultural domination exercised by the bomb by inquiring into the common sense nature of nuclear discourse. This rests on the assumption that uncritically accepted ideas about what nuclear weapons do have been instrumental in generating the current nuclear order that, although under mounting challenges, remains based on a hierarchy between states protected by the bomb and all the rest. To understand how civil society challenges and reproduces that order, this thesis analyses the calls for nuclear disarmament advanced by organised collective actors and inquires, in a Gramscian way, into the common sense ingrained in those calls as well as their ability to constitute a united front. As a result, the thesis problematises the notion of disarmament, marking the importance of a struggle on its very concept between reductionist and abolitionist frames. It indicates that while the latter are involved in a radical opposition, the former are culturally dominated by the system of deterrence, thus coming to represent two distinct historic blocs: a counter-hegemonic opposition, on one hand, and an unwitting part of the hegemonic apparatus, on the other. This thesis concludes that 1) civil society is far from having created a unity of intent; and 2) the bases for the reliance on nuclear weapons are deeply entrenched, because of the pervasiveness, even inside civil society, of a common sense view of the nuclear threat.openDottorato di ricerca in Political TheoryMulas, RobertaMulas, Robert