285 research outputs found

    Society-oriented cryptographic techniques for information protection

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    Groups play an important role in our modern world. They are more reliable and more trustworthy than individuals. This is the reason why, in an organisation, crucial decisions are left to a group of people rather than to an individual. Cryptography supports group activity by offering a wide range of cryptographic operations which can only be successfully executed if a well-defined group of people agrees to co-operate. This thesis looks at two fundamental cryptographic tools that are useful for the management of secret information. The first part looks in detail at secret sharing schemes. The second part focuses on society-oriented cryptographic systems, which are the application of secret sharing schemes in cryptography. The outline of thesis is as follows

    The Proceedings of 14th Australian Information Security Management Conference, 5-6 December 2016, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

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    The annual Security Congress, run by the Security Research Institute at Edith Cowan University, includes the Australian Information Security and Management Conference. Now in its fourteenth year, the conference remains popular for its diverse content and mixture of technical research and discussion papers. The area of information security and management continues to be varied, as is reflected by the wide variety of subject matter covered by the papers this year. The conference has drawn interest and papers from within Australia and internationally. All submitted papers were subject to a double blind peer review process. Fifteen papers were submitted from Australia and overseas, of which ten were accepted for final presentation and publication. We wish to thank the reviewers for kindly volunteering their time and expertise in support of this event. We would also like to thank the conference committee who have organised yet another successful congress. Events such as this are impossible without the tireless efforts of such people in reviewing and editing the conference papers, and assisting with the planning, organisation and execution of the conferences. To our sponsors also a vote of thanks for both the financial and moral support provided to the conference. Finally, thank you to the administrative and technical staff, and students of the ECU Security Research Institute for their contributions to the running of the conference

    Corruption in higher education in Nigeria : prevalence, structures and patterns among students of higher education institutions in Nigeria.

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    Ph. D. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg 2015.Discourses, conversations and commentaries, and scholarly articles on Nigerian economy, politics, and society tend always to involve corruption. Violent changes of government as well as democratic leadership selection invariably make references to corruption as a justification for change. Every government since the country’s independence has been assailed as either being corrupt or doing too little to fight corruption. Corruption is said to pervade every sector of the Nigerian society including education. Every stakeholder in higher education has at one time or another been accused of corruption. This study is concerned with one of the primary stakeholders in higher education – students. The study examines the prevalence, structures, and patterns of corruption among students of tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Prevalence refers to the spread and depth of corruption in the consciousness of students while patterns suggest the forms in which the phenomenon finds expression. Structures are the opportunities for corrupt behaviour. It elicited students’ ideas and concepts of corruption by means of focus group discussions and surveys based on semi-structured questionnaire. Empirical data were collected at ABU, UNN, FUTA, UNIPORT, IAUE, Rivpoly, FCEZ, and FCE (T) among others. These institutions were selected to represent the ethnic heterogeneity of the country as well as the three main types of higher education institutions in the country. Resource constraints and logistical factors meant that only two institutions were covered in the northern part of the country. However, the university selected in the north, ABU, has the entire 19 Northern States as its catchment area. The distribution of questionnaires among the various institutions also ensured that this limitation does not adversely affect the representation of the North in the sample. The field work for this research was done in two phases in 2009 and 2010. Though this is not a historical study, it was carried out at a particular historical conjuncture and therefore can be said to deal with undergraduates of Nigerian tertiary institutions in the first decade of the 21st Century. It introduces the concept of higher education student corruption to capture corruption among students. It treats higher education student corruption as a complex and composite phenomenon with various aspects or interrelated dimensions. It finds that students have ideas and conceptions of corruption. It argues that students’ ideas and conceptions of corruption are largely derived from student handbooks issued by the various institutions and from the environment. Consequently, it holds that students’ ideas and concepts of corruption are not original or distinctive but are of the genre of conceptions of corruption as abuse or misuse of office. The study elucidates the key elements of students’ ideas and conceptions of corruption and examines their explanation for why some of them participate in corrupt practices. It classifies the variables in terms of the concepts with which students explain higher education student corruption into personal characteristics, establishment characteristics of higher education institutions, and the culture of corruption and, explores how these engender corrupt practices among students. It identifies the major patterns of corruption that are prevalent among students as absenteeism, activisms, bribe/bribery, fraudulent conduct, cultism, dereliction, drug/alcohol abuse, examination malpractice, indecent dressing, sexual behaviour, theft/stealing, and unruly behaviour. The study also identifies and differentiates structures from patterns of corruption. The key structures of higher education corruption are teaching and learning, examinations, and accommodation as most of the patterns of corruption identified are imbedded in them. The study found that higher education institutions are not only ill-equipped to deal with higher education student corruption but actually drive the phenomenon. This lack of capacity is related to underfunding by owner agencies such as the government, mismanagement of resources and maladministration by the management of higher education institutions, and societal pressures on both the institutions and the students. These will likely hinder current efforts being made by national anticorruption agencies such as the ICPC to combat corruption in the education sector

    Volunteer computing

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    Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-216).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.This thesis presents the idea of volunteer computing, which allows high-performance parallel computing networks to be formed easily, quickly, and inexpensively by enabling ordinary Internet users to share their computers' idle processing power without needing expert help. In recent years, projects such as SETI@home have demonstrated the great potential power of volunteer computing. In this thesis, we identify volunteer computing's further potentials, and show how these can be achieved. We present the Bayanihan system for web-based volunteer computing. Using Java applets, Bayanihan enables users to volunteer their computers by simply visiting a web page. This makes it possible to set up parallel computing networks in a matter of minutes compared to the hours, days, or weeks required by traditional NOW and metacomputing systems. At the same time, Bayanihan provides a flexible object-oriented software framework that makes it easy for programmers to write various applications, and for researchers to address issues such as adaptive parallelism, fault-tolerance, and scalability. Using Bayanihan, we develop a general-purpose runtime system and APIs, and show how volunteer computing's usefulness extends beyond solving esoteric mathematical problems to other, more practical, master-worker applications such as image rendering, distributed web-crawling, genetic algorithms, parametric analysis, and Monte Carlo simulations. By presenting a new API using the bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) model, we further show that contrary to popular belief and practice, volunteer computing need not be limited to master-worker applications, but can be used for coarse-grain message-passing programs as well. Finally, we address the new problem of maintaining reliability in the presence of malicious volunteers. We present and analyze traditional techniques such as voting, and new ones such as spot-checking, encrypted computation, and periodic obfuscation. Then, we show how these can be integrated in a new idea called credibility-based fault-tolerance, which uses probability estimates to limit and direct the use of redundancy. We validate this new idea with parallel Monte Carlo simulations, and show how it can achieve error rates several orders-of-magnitude smaller than traditional voting for the same slowdown.by Luis F.G. Sarmenta.Ph.D

    CPA\u27s handbook of fraud and commercial crime prevention

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    https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1823/thumbnail.jp

    Secure group key agreement

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    As a result of the increased popularity of group-oriented applications and protocols, group communication occurs in many different settings: from network multicasting to application layer tele- and video-conferencing. Regardless of the application environment, security services are necessary to provide communication privacy and integrity. This thesis considers the problem of key management in a special class of groups, namely dynamic peer groups. Key management, especially in a group setting, is the corner stone for all other security services. Dynamic peer groups require not only initial key agreement but also auxiliary key agreement operations such as member addition, member exclusion and group fusion. We discuss all group key agreement operations and present a concrete protocol suite, CLIQUES, which offers all of these operations. By providing the first formal model for group key establishment and investigating carefully the underlying cryptographic assumptions as well as their relations, we formally prove the security of a subset of the protocols based on the security of the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption; achieving as a side-effect the first provably secure group key agreement protocolMit der Verbreitung offener Netze, insbesondere des Internets, fand auch die Gruppenkommunikation eine rasante Verbreitung. Eine Vielzahl heutiger Protokolle sind gruppen-orientiert: angefangen bei Multicast-Diensten in der Netzwerkschicht bis hin zu Videokonferenzsystemen auf der Anwendungsschicht. Alle diese Dienste haben Sicherheitsanforderungen wie Vertraulichkeit und Integrität zu erfüllen, die den Einsatz kryptographischer Techniken und die Verfügbarkeit gemeinsamer kryptographischen Schlüssel oft unumgänglich machen. In der folgenden Doktorarbeit betrachte ich dieses grundlegendste Problem der Gruppenkommunikation, nämlich das Schlüsselmanagement, für dynamische Gruppen, die sogenannten "Dynamic Peer-Groups';. Die Dynamik dieser Gruppen erfordert nicht nur initialen Schlüsselaustausch innerhalb einer Gruppe sondern auch sichere und effiziente Verfahren für die Aufnahme neuer und den Ausschluß alter Gruppenmitglieder. Ich diskutiere alle dafür notwendigen Dienste und präsentiere CLIQUES, eine Familie von Protokollen, die diese Dienste implementiert. Ich gebe erstmalig eine formale Definition fü sicheres Gruppen-Schlüsselmanagement und beweise die Sicherheit der genannten Protokolle basierend auf einer kryptographischen Standardannahme, der "Decisional Diffie-Hellman'; Annahme. Diese Sicherheitsbetrachtung wird durch eine detaillierte Untersuchung dieser Annahme und ihrer Relation zu verwandten Annahmen abgeschlossen
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