Privacy protocols

Security protocols enable secure communication over insecure channels. Privacy protocols enable private interactions over secure channels. Security protocols set up secure channels using cryptographic primitives. Privacy protocols set up private channels using secure channels. But just like some security protocols can be broken without breaking the underlying cryptography, some privacy protocols can be broken without breaking the underlying security. Such privacy attacks have been used to leverage e-commerce against targeted advertising from the outset; but their depth and scope became apparent only with the overwhelming advent of influence campaigns in politics. The blurred boundaries between privacy protocols and privacy attacks present a new challenge for protocol analysis. Covert channels turn out to be concealed not only below overt channels, but also above: subversions, and the level-below attacks are supplemented by sublimations and the level-above attacks.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figure

An Economic Analysis of Agricultural Sustainability in Orissa

The development of a method for generating Sustainable Livelihood Security Index (SLSI) for agricultural sustainability and evaluating the existing status has been reported. Some measures have been suggested to promote sustainable agriculture of Orissa. This state has been selected since it faces wide inequality, improper management and over-exploitation of natural resources and explosion of population. These have created a threat to ecological balance and economic as well as social status of households in different districts of the state. The study of Ecological Security Index (ESI), Economic Efficiency Index (EEI) and Social Equity Index (SEI) has revealed that the agricultural systems of all districts display wide variations in their ecological and social equity aspects relative to their economic aspects. The districts with better SLSI ranks are often described as advanced districts and vice versa. Hence, SLSI has been found to reflect the picture of overall performance of a district in three dimensions of sustainability. On the basis of the overall performance of districts in terms of their SLSI, only eight districts in the state have an index value of more than 0.5, while thirteen districts have SLSI less than 0.4. Also, many districts of coastal Orissa have depicted better performance in agricultural sustainability in comparison to the districts of western Orissa as a whole. Some policy implications of SLSI approach have also been reported.Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management,

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Using graphical models and multi-attribute utility theory for probabilistic uncertainty handling in large systems, with application to nuclear emergency management

Although many decision-making problems involve uncertainty, uncertainty handling within large decision support systems (DSSs) is challenging. One domain where uncertainty handling is critical is emergency response management, in particular nuclear emergency response, where decision making takes place in an uncertain, dynamically changing environment. Assimilation and analysis of data can help to reduce these uncertainties, but it is critical to do this in an efficient and defensible way. After briefly introducing the structure of a typical DSS for nuclear emergencies, the paper sets up a theoretical structure that enables a formal Bayesian decision analysis to be performed for environments like this within a DSS architecture. In such probabilistic DSSs many input conditional probability distributions are provided by different sets of experts overseeing different aspects of the emergency. These probabilities are then used by the decision maker (DM) to find her optimal decision. We demonstrate in this paper that unless due care is taken in such a composite framework, coherence and rationality may be compromised in a sense made explicit below. The technology we describe here builds a framework around which Bayesian data updating can be performed in a modular way, ensuring both coherence and efficiency, and provides sufficient unambiguous information to enable the DM to discover her expected utility maximizing policy

Sustainable Development Indicator Frameworks and Initiatives

Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Production Economics,

The Transitivity of Trust Problem in the Interaction of Android Applications

Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may interact, restricting single applications may create a false sense of security for the end users while data may still leave the mobile phone through other applications. Instead, the information flow needs to be policed for the composite system of applications in a transparent and usable manner. In this paper, we propose to employ static analysis based on the software architecture and focused data flow analysis to scalably detect information flows between components. Specifically, we aim to reveal transitivity of trust problems in multi-component mobile platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with Android applications, although the generalization of the analysis to similar composition-based architectures, such as Service-oriented Architecture, can also be explored in the future

Web Service Trust: Towards A Dynamic Assessment Framework

Trust in software services is a key prerequisite for the success and wide adoption of services-oriented computing (SOC) in an open Internet world. However, trust is poorly assessed by existing methods and technologies, especially in dynamically composed and deployed SOC systems. In this paper, we discuss current methods for assessing trust in service-oriented computing and identify gaps of current platforms, in particular with regards to runtime trust assessment. To address these gaps, we propose a model of runtime trust assessment of software services and introduce a framework for realizing the model. A key characteristic of our approach is the support that it offers for customizable assessment of trust based on evidence collected during the operation of software services and its ability to combine this evidence with subjective assessments coming from service clients