Digital Architecture as Crime Control

This paper explains how theories of realspace architecture inform the prevention of computer crime. Despite the prevalence of the metaphor, architects in realspace and cyberspace have not talked to one another. There is a dearth of literature about digital architecture and crime altogether, and the realspace architectural literature on crime prevention is often far too soft for many software engineers. This paper will suggest the broad brushstrokes of potential design solutions to cybercrime, and in the course of so doing, will pose severe criticisms of the White House\u27s recent proposals on cybersecurity. The paper begins by introducing four concepts of realspace crime prevention through architecture. Design should: (1) create opportunities for natural surveillance, meaning its visibility and susceptibility to monitoring by residents, neighbors, and bystanders; (2) instill a sense of territoriality so that residents develop proprietary attitudes and outsiders feel deterred from entering a private space; (3) build communities and avoid social isolation; and (4) protect targets of crime. There are digital analogues to each goal. Natural-surveillance principles suggest new virtues of open-source platforms, such as Linux, and territoriality outlines a strong case for moving away from digital anonymity towards psuedonymity. The goal of building communities will similarly expose some new advantages for the original, and now eroding, end-to-end design of the Internet. An understanding of architecture and target prevention will illuminate why firewalls at end points will more effectively guarantee security than will attempts to bundle security into the architecture of the Net. And, in total, these architectural lessons will help us chart an alternative course to the federal government\u27s tepid approach to computer crime. By leaving the bulk of crime prevention to market forces, the government will encourage private barricades to develop - the equivalent of digital gated communities - with terrible consequences for the Net in general and interconnectivity in particular

Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Guiding Principles

Provides guidance on integrating recording, documentation, and information management of territories, sites, groups of buildings, or monuments into the conservation process; evaluating proposals; consulting specialists; and controlling implementation

The Meaning of Memory Safety

We give a rigorous characterization of what it means for a programming language to be memory safe, capturing the intuition that memory safety supports local reasoning about state. We formalize this principle in two ways. First, we show how a small memory-safe language validates a noninterference property: a program can neither affect nor be affected by unreachable parts of the state. Second, we extend separation logic, a proof system for heap-manipulating programs, with a memory-safe variant of its frame rule. The new rule is stronger because it applies even when parts of the program are buggy or malicious, but also weaker because it demands a stricter form of separation between parts of the program state. We also consider a number of pragmatically motivated variations on memory safety and the reasoning principles they support. As an application of our characterization, we evaluate the security of a previously proposed dynamic monitor for memory safety of heap-allocated data.Comment: POST'18 final versio

The U.S. Science and Engineering Workforce: Recent, Current, and Projected Employment, Wages, and Unemployment

[Excerpt] As Congress develops policies and programs and makes appropriations to help address the nation’s needs for scientists and engineers, it may wish to consider past, current, and projected S&E workforce trends. In this regard, this report provides employment, wage, and unemployment information for the computer occupations, mathematical occupations, engineers, life scientists, physical scientists, and S&E management occupations, in three sections: “Current Employment, Wages, and Unemployment” provides a statistical snapshot of the S&E workforce in 2011 (the latest year for which data are available) with respect to occupational employment, wage, and unemployment data. “Recent Trends in Employment, Wages, and Unemployment” provides a perspective on how S&E employment, wages, and unemployment have changed during the 2008-2011 period. “Employment Projections, 2010-2020” provides an analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ occupational projections examining how the number employed in S&E occupations are expected to change during the 2010-2020 period, as well as how many openings will be created by workers exiting each occupation (replacement needs). A final section, “Concluding Observations,” provides various stakeholder perspectives that Congress may wish to consider as it seeks to ensure that the United States has an adequate S&E workforce to meet the demands of the 21st century

E-Commerce and Trans-Atlantic Privacy

For almost a decade, the United States and Europe have anticipated a clash over the protection of personal information. Between the implementation in Europe of comprehensive legal protections pursuant to the directive on data protection and the continued reliance on industry self-regulation in the United States, trans-Atlantic privacy policies have been at odds with each other. The rapid growth in e-commerce is now sparking the long-anticipated trans-Atlantic privacy clash. This Article will first look at the context of American e-commerce and the disjuncture between citizens\u27 privacy and business practices. The Article will then turn to the international context and explore the adverse impact, on the status quo in the United States, of European data protection law as harmonized by Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 Oct. 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. Following this analysis, the Article will show that the “safe harbor” agreement between the United States Department of Commerce and the European Commission--designed to alleviate the threat of disruption in trans-Atlantic data flows and, in particular, to mollify concerns for the stability of online data transfers--is only a weak, seriously flawed solution for e-commerce. In the end, extra-legal technical measures and contractual mechanisms might minimize privacy conflicts for e-commerce transactions, but an international treaty is likely the only sustainable solution for long-term growth in trans-border commercial interchange

Active networks: an evolution of the internet

Active Networks can be seen as an evolution of the classical model of packet-switched networks. The traditional and ”passive” network model is based on a static definition of the network node behaviour. Active Networks propose an “active” model where the intermediate nodes (switches and routers) can load and execute user code contained in the data units (packets). Active Networks are a programmable network model, where bandwidth and computation are both considered shared network resources. This approach opens up new interesting research fields. This paper gives a short introduction of Active Networks, discusses the advantages they introduce and presents the research advances in this field

Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography

This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First, it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems, programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the literature

50 years of isolation

The traditional means for isolating applications from each other is via the use of operating system provided “process” abstraction facilities. However, as applications now consist of multiple fine-grained components, the traditional process abstraction model is proving to be insufficient in ensuring this isolation. Statistics indicate that a high percentage of software failure occurs due to propagation of component failures. These observations are further bolstered by the attempts by modern Internet browser application developers, for example, to adopt multi-process architectures in order to increase robustness. Therefore, a fresh look at the available options for isolating program components is necessary and this paper provides an overview of previous and current research on the area