15,370 research outputs found
Multi-stakeholder design of forest governance and accountability arrangements in Equator province, Democratic Republic of Congo
Good forest governance is an increasingly important topic for stakeholders in many different settings around the world. Two of the best-known international initiatives to improve forest governance are the regional Forest Law Enforcement and Governance (FLEG) ministerial processes supported by the World Bank, and the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan. Designed to support and complement such initiatives, the IUCN project “Strengthening Voices for Better Choices” (SVBC) is piloting improved forest governance arrangements in six countries in Africa, Asia and South America. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of three project countries in Africa, SVBC has created multi-stakeholder platforms at local, territorial and provincial levels for this purpose
Disempowerment and resistance in the print industry? Reactions to surveillance-capable technology
This article offers a critique of recent characterisations of the effects of electronic technologies in the workplace. It presents detailed case study evidence that calls into question a number of common theoretical assumptions about the character of surveillance at work and the responses of employees to it
SAFIUS - A secure and accountable filesystem over untrusted storage
We describe SAFIUS, a secure accountable file system that resides over an
untrusted storage. SAFIUS provides strong security guarantees like
confidentiality, integrity, prevention from rollback attacks, and
accountability. SAFIUS also enables read/write sharing of data and provides the
standard UNIX-like interface for applications. To achieve accountability with
good performance, it uses asynchronous signatures; to reduce the space required
for storing these signatures, a novel signature pruning mechanism is used.
SAFIUS has been implemented on a GNU/Linux based system modifying OpenGFS.
Preliminary performance studies show that SAFIUS has a tolerable overhead for
providing secure storage: while it has an overhead of about 50% of OpenGFS in
data intensive workloads (due to the overhead of performing
encryption/decryption in software), it is comparable (or better in some cases)
to OpenGFS in metadata intensive workloads.Comment: 11pt, 12 pages, 16 figure
Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning
The secret keys of critical network authorities - such as time, name,
certificate, and software update services - represent high-value targets for
hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to
compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively
from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness
cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and
publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept
it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has
been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S
is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still
guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to
risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses.
Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without
communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first
transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers
who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several
witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature
methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature
aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype
demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities,
enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative
statements in under two seconds.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
Privacy in an Ambient World
Privacy is a prime concern in today's information society. To protect\ud
the privacy of individuals, enterprises must follow certain privacy practices, while\ud
collecting or processing personal data. In this chapter we look at the setting where an\ud
enterprise collects private data on its website, processes it inside the enterprise and\ud
shares it with partner enterprises. In particular, we analyse three different privacy\ud
systems that can be used in the different stages of this lifecycle. One of them is the\ud
Audit Logic, recently introduced, which can be used to keep data private when it\ud
travels across enterprise boundaries. We conclude with an analysis of the features\ud
and shortcomings of these systems
Accountability and Control as Catalysts for Strategic Exploration and Exploitation: Field Study Results
This paper reports the collective finding from 102 field studies that look at the relationship between two organization design variables: span of control and span of accountability. Clustering the data yields propositions suggesting that the relationship between these variables may be an important determinant of strategic exploitation and exploration activities. Data from the field studies suggest that, in accordance with the controllability principle, accountability and control are tightly aligned for exploitation activities. However, this result was found in only a small number of tasks and functions. In the majority of situations, spans of accountability were wider than spans of control. This "Entrepreneurial Gap" is posited to be a result of management's desire for innovation and exploration-and used as a catalyst for changing strategy, creating high levels of customer satisfaction, or motivating people to navigate complex matrix organizations.Ambidextrous Organization, Strategic Exploration and Exploitation, Entrepreneurial Gap, Accountability, Span of Control
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