Inheritance Forgery

Many venerable norms in inheritance law were designed to prevent forgery. Most prominently, since 1837, the Wills Act has required testators to express their last wishes in a signed and witnessed writing. Likewise, the court-supervised probate process helped ensure that a donative instrument was genuine and that assets passed to their rightful owners. But in the mid-twentieth century, concern about forgery waned. Based in part on the perception that counterfeit estate plans are rare, several states relaxed the Wills Act and authorized new formalities for notarized and even digital wills. In addition, lawmakers encouraged owners to bypass probate altogether by transmitting wealth through devices such as life insurance and transfer-on-death deeds. This Article offers a fresh look at inheritance-related forgery. Cutting against the conventional wisdom, it discovers that counterfeit donative instruments are a serious problem. Using reported cases, empirical research, grand jury investigations, and media stories, it reveals that courts routinely adjudicate credible claims that wills, deeds, and life insurance beneficiary designations are illegitimate. The Article then argues that the persistence of inheritance-related forgeries casts doubt on the wisdom of some recent innovations, including statutes that permit notarized and electronic wills. The Article also challenges well-established inheritance law norms, including the litigation presumptions in will-forgery contests, the widespread practice of rubber-stamping deeds, and the delegation of responsibility for authenticating a nonprobate transfer to private companies. Finally, the Article outlines reforms to modernize succession while remaining sensitive to the risks of forgery

Elder law instutute

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held October 1-2, 2020

Blockchain for digital government

In less than ten years from its advent in 2008, the concept of distributed ledgers has entered into mainstream research and policy agendas. Enthusiastic reception, fuelled by the success of Bitcoin and the explosion of potential use cases created high, if not hyped, expectations with respect to the transformative role of blockchain for the industry and the public sector. Growing experimentation with distributed ledgers and the emergence of the first operational implementations provide an opportunity to go beyond hype and speculation based on theoretical use cases. This report looks at the ongoing exploration of blockchain technology by governments. The analysis of a group of pioneering developments of public services shows that blockchain technology can reduce bureaucracy, increase the efficiency of administrative processes and increase the level of trust in public record keeping. Based on the state-of-art developments, blockchain has not yet demonstrated to be either transformative or even disruptive innovation for governments as it is sometimes portrayed. Ongoing projects bring incremental rather than fundamental changes to the operational capacities of governments. Nevertheless some of them propose clear value for citizens. Technological and ecosystem maturity of distributed ledgers have to increase in order to unlock the transformative power of blockchain. Policy agenda should focus on non-technological barriers, such as incompatibility between blockchain-based solutions and existing legal and organizational frameworks. This principal policy goal cannot be achieved by adapting technology to legacy systems. It requires using the transformative power of blockchain to be used to create new processes, organizations, structures and standards. Hence, policy support should stimulate more experimentation with both the technology and new administrative processes that can be re-engineered for blockchain.JRC.B.6-Digital Econom

DBKnot: A Transparent and Seamless, Pluggable Tamper Evident Database

Database integrity is crucial to organizations that rely on databases of important data. They suffer from the vulnerability to internal fraud. Database tampering by internal malicious employees with high technical authorization to their infrastructure or even compromised by externals is one of the important attack vectors. This thesis addresses such challenge in a class of problems where data is appended only and is immutable. Examples of operations where data does not change is a) financial institutions (banks, accounting systems, stock market, etc., b) registries and notary systems where important data is kept but is never subject to change, and c) system logs that must be kept intact for performance and forensic inspection if needed. The target of the approach is implementation seamlessness with little-or-no changes required in existing systems. Transaction tracking for tamper detection is done by utilizing a common hashtable that serially and cumulatively hashes transactions together while using an external time-stamper and signer to sign such linkages together. This allows transactions to be tracked without any of the organizations’ data leaving their premises and going to any third-party which also reduces the performance impact of tracking. This is done so by adding a tracking layer and embedding it inside the data workflow while keeping it as un-invasive as possible. DBKnot implements such features a) natively into databases, or b) embedded inside Object Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks, and finally c) outlines a direction of implementing it as a stand-alone microservice reverse-proxy. A prototype ORM and database layer has been developed and tested for seamlessness of integration and ease of use. Additionally, different models of optimization by implementing pipelining parallelism in the hashing/signing process have been tested in order to check their impact on performance. Stock-market information was used for experimentation with DBKnot and the initial results gave a slightly less than 100% increase in transaction time by using the most basic, sequential, and synchronous version of DBKnot. Signing and hashing overhead does not show significant increase per record with the increased amount of data. A number of different alternate optimizations were done to the design that via testing have resulted in significant increase in performance

Advances in Information Security and Privacy

With the recent pandemic emergency, many people are spending their days in smart working and have increased their use of digital resources for both work and entertainment. The result is that the amount of digital information handled online is dramatically increased, and we can observe a significant increase in the number of attacks, breaches, and hacks. This Special Issue aims to establish the state of the art in protecting information by mitigating information risks. This objective is reached by presenting both surveys on specific topics and original approaches and solutions to specific problems. In total, 16 papers have been published in this Special Issue

Legislative Update 2021

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held June 9, 2021

48th Annual Midwest Estate, Tax & Business Planning Institute

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held June 3-4, 2021

SecMVC : a model for secure software design based on the model-view-controller pattern

Current advances in the software development industry are growing more ubiquitous by the day. This has caused for security, not only in the broader sense, but specifically within the design and overall development of software itself, to become all the more important. An evidently prevalent problem in the domain of software development is that software security is not consistently addressed during design, which undermines core security concerns, and leads to the development of insecure software. This research seeks to address this issue via a model for secure software design, which is based on a software design pattern, namely, the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The use of a pattern to convey knowledge is not a new notion. However, the ability of software design patterns to convey secure software design is an idea worth investigating. Following identification of secure software design principles and concepts, as well as software design patterns, specifically those relating to the MVC pattern, a model was designed and developed. With the MVC pattern argued as being a suitable foundation for the model, the security conscious MVC (SecMVC) combines secure software design principles and concepts into the MVC pattern. Together herewith, the MVC pattern’s components in the MVC Compound pattern, namely: the Observer pattern, the Strategy pattern, and the Composite pattern, have provided further sub-models for less abstraction and greater detail. These sub-models were developed, as a result of the SecMVC model’s evaluation in the validation for this study, an expert review. Argued in the light of similar research methods, the expert review was chosen – along with a process that included the use of two expert participants to validate the SecMVC model. It was determined through the expert review that the SecMVC model is of sufficient utility, quality, and efficacy to constitute research value. The research methodology process followed was design science, in which the SecMVC model, which includes its related sub-models, serves as the artefact and research output of this study. This research study contributes evidence of the feasibility for integrating knowledge into software design patterns. This includes the SecMVC model itself. In addition, it argues for the use of an expert review, as an evaluative research method for such an artifact