Crime, Innovation, and the Technology of Money

The emergence of Bitcoin has raised fundamental questions about traditional understandings of money. As the boundaries of what is accepted as money becomes increasingly blurred, so do the types of crime associated with the emergence of new monetary instruments. There is an urgent need to understand and clarify where cryptocurrencies fit within a wider regulatory landscape associated with other forms of money and digital technologies since these criminal activities confound traditional responses to crime, systems of social control, and regulation. To explore this issue, my research focuses on the relationships between money, monetary crime, and forms of regulation, and conducts its analysis across time. By doing so, this project’s original contribution will be to offer new perspectives on the challenges and legal uncertainties faced by cryptocurrencies today by drawing on the formative moments of historical forms of money. My research adopts a comparative-historical analysis looking at three case studies: banknotes forgery in the 19th century, credit card fraud in the 1970s and the use and misuse of Bitcoin in the 21st Century. This thesis proposes that a first step in dealing with these challenges is to bring to the fore and reposition the concept of monetary crime. This will enable a more targeted and granular analysis of criminal activities associated with new forms of money and liberate it from pre-defined labels. A second step is to level the playing field between cryptocurrencies and monetary crime by firstly accepting that cryptocurrencies should be clearly differentiated. Secondly, that cryptocurrencies should have their own hierarchy to exempt those which pose little risk from financial regulation. And thirdly, that cryptocurrencies would benefit from becoming aligned with payment services, financial services, and e-money regulations. This would bring into line existing legislation, and the protection they currently afford to forms of money, to cryptocurrencies

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

Formal Foundations for Anonymous Communication

Mit jeder Online-Tätigkeit hinterlassen wir digitale Fußspuren. Unternehmen und Regierungen nutzen die privaten Informationen, die von den riesigen Datenmengen der Online-Spuren abgeleitet werden können, um ihre Nutzer und Büger zu manipulieren. Als Gegenmaßnahme wurden anonyme Kommunikationsnetze vorgeschlagen. Diesen fehlen jedoch umfassende formale Grundlagen und folglich ist der Vergleich zwischen verschiedenen Ansätzen nur sehr eingeschränkt möglich. Mit einer gemeinsamen Grundlage zwischen allen Forschern und Entwicklern von anonymen Kommunikationsnetzen können Missverständnisse vermieden werden und die dringend benötigte Entwicklung von den Netzen wird beschleunigt. Mit Vergleichbarkeit zwischen den Lösungen, können die für den jeweiligen Anwendungsfall optimalen Netze besser identifiziert und damit die Entwicklungsanstrengungen gezielter auf Projekte verteilt werden. Weiterhin ermöglichen formale Grundlagen und Vergleichbarkeit ein tieferes Verständnis für die Grenzen und Effekte der eingesetzten Techniken zu erlangen. Diese Arbeit liefert zuerst neue Erkenntnisse zu generellen Formalisierungen für anonyme Kommunikation, bevor sie sich dann auf die praktisch am meisten verbreitete Technik konzentriert: Onion Routing und Mix Netzwerke. Als erstes wird die Vergleichbarkeit zwischen Privatsphärezielen sichergestellt, indem sie formal definiert und miteinander verglichen werden. Dabei enteht eine umfangreiche Hierarchie von eindeutigen Privatsphärezielen. Als zweites werden vorgeschlagene Netzwerke analysiert, um deren Grundbausteine zu identifizieren und deren Schutz als Auswirkung in der Hierarchy zu untersuchen. Diese Grunlagen erlauben Konflikte und Schwachstellen in existierenden Arbeiten zu entdecken und aufzuklären. Genauer zeigt sich damit, dass basierend of derselben informalen Definition verschieden stark schützende formale Versionen entstanden sind. Weiterhin werden in dieser Arbeit die Notions genutzt um existierende Unmöglichkeitsresultate für anonyme Kommunikation zu vergleichen. Dabei wird nicht nur die erste vollständige Sicht auf alle bekannten Schranken für anonyme Kommunikationsnetze gegeben, sondern mit einem tiefgründigen Ansatz werden die existierenden Schranken auch gestärkt und zu praktischen, dem Stand der Kunst entsprechenden Netzen in Bezug gesetzt. Letztlich konnten durch die generellen Betrachtungen von vorgeschlagenen Netzwerken und ihren Grundbausteinen, insbesondere auch Angriffe auf die vorherrschende Klasse von anonymen Kommunikationsnetzen gefunden werden: auf Onion Routing und Mix-Netzwerke. Davon motiviert wurden als zweiter Teil dieser Arbeit die formalen Grundlagen und praktisch eingesetzten Lösungen for Onion Routing und Mix-Netzwerke untersucht. Dabei wurde festgestellt, dass die bereits erwähnten Angriffe teilweise auf eine fehlerhafte, aber weit verbreitete Beweisstrategie für solche Netze zurückzuführen sind und es wurde eine sichere Beweisstrategie als deren Ersatz vorgeschlagen. Weiterhin wurde die neue Strategie für ein vorgeschlagenes, aber bisher nicht weiter verwendetes Paketformat eingesetzt und dieses als sicher bewiesen. Dieses Paketformat unterstützt allerdings keine Rückantworten, was höchstwahrscheinlich der Grund ist, aus dem sich aktuelle Netze auf ein unsicheres Paketformat verlassen. Deshalb wurde im Rahmen dieser Arbeit eine konzeptuelle, sichere Lösung für Onion Routing mit Rückantworten entworfen. Als weitere verwandte Beiträge, zeigt die Arbeit Beziehungen von Teilen der generellen Ergebnisse für anonyme Kommunikationsnetze zu ähnlichen, aber bisher hauptsächlich getrennt betrachteten Forschungsbereichen, wie Privatsphäre auf der Bitübertragungsschicht, Kontaktnachverfolgung und privatsphäre-schützenden, digitalen Bezahlsystemen

The dark side of the internet: a study about representations of the deep web and the Tor network in the British press

The imaginary of the Deep Web is commonly associated with crime, crypto markets and immoral content. However, the best-known Deep Web system, the Tor Network, is a technology developed to protect people’s privacy through online anonymity, in the context of the contemporary culture of surveillance, thus enabling civil liberties. To understand this contradiction, this thesis looks at the British press representation of the Deep Web and the Tor Network. An extensive empirical research study unveils how newspapers portray these technologies, by looking at meanings, uses and users. In order to meet this goal, this research conducts a content analysis of 833 articles about Deep Web technologies published between 2001 and 2017 by six British newspapers – tabloids Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Sun, and quality newspapers Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Times – and a critical discourse analysis of 58 reports mentioning the Tor Network, issued by the same newspapers, between 2008 and 2017. The findings demonstrate that the British press represents the Deep Web in a sharply negative way, through negative concepts, definitions and associations. This portrayal attributes opacity to the Deep Web, engendering distrust of its uses and propagating user stereotypes that reflect an overall criminalisation of privacy. Also, the press presents a hyper- panic approach by consistently connecting this new medium to well-known social anxieties and portraying these technologies as undesirable, immoral and illegal. Hyper-panic is the theoretical contribution of this thesis and can be explained as the way in which media panic (the Deep Web, in this case) multiplies moral panic (for instance, terrorism, paedophilia and drug consumption). Specifically about Tor, this work concludes that the media present multiple aspects of this system, from discussing the ways in which one can enable civil liberties, to condemning criminals hiding behind technology, addressing the inherent ambivalence connected to the uses of online anonymity, i.e. it is neither completely bad nor completely good. The general synopsis about Tor, however, is still negative. Finally, the consistent association by the British press between the Deep Web and criminal and antisocial behaviours promotes a dissociation between the Deep Web and the Web itself, in that cyberspace is separated between negative uses (the Deep Web) and positive uses (the Web), instead of being understood as a nuanced whole

Applied Metaheuristic Computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC

Secure identity management in structured peer-to-peer (P2P) networks

Structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks were proposed to solve routing problems of big distributed infrastructures. But the research community has been questioning their security for years. Most prior work in security services was focused on secure routing, reputation systems, anonymity, etc. However, the proper management of identities is an important prerequisite to provide most of these security services. The existence of anonymous nodes and the lack of a centralized authority capable of monitoring (and/or punishing) nodes make these systems more vulnerable against selfish or malicious behaviors. Moreover, these improper usages cannot be faced only with data confidentiality, nodes authentication, non-repudiation, etc. In particular, structured P2P networks should follow the following secure routing primitives: (1) secure maintenance of routing tables, (2) secure routing of messages, and (3) secure identity assignment to nodes. But the first two problems depend in some way on the third one. If nodes’ identifiers can be chosen by users without any control, these networks can have security and operational problems. Therefore, like any other network or service, structured P2P networks require a robust access control to prevent potential attackers joining the network and a robust identity assignment system to guarantee their proper operation. In this thesis, firstly, we analyze the operation of the current structured P2P networks when managing identities in order to identify what security problems are related to the nodes’ identifiers within the overlay, and propose a series of requirements to be accomplished by any generated node ID to provide more security to a DHT-based structured P2P network. Secondly, we propose the use of implicit certificates to provide more security and to exploit the improvement in bandwidth, storage and performance that these certificates present compared to explicit certificates, design three protocols to assign nodes’ identifiers avoiding the identified problems, while maintaining user anonymity and allowing users’ traceability. Finally, we analyze the operation of the most used mechanisms to distribute revocation data in the Internet, with special focus on the proposed systems to work in P2P networks, and design a new mechanism to distribute revocation data more efficiently in a structured P2P network.Las redes P2P estructuradas fueron propuestas para solventar problemas de enrutamiento en infraestructuras de grandes dimensiones pero su nivel de seguridad lleva años siendo cuestionado por la comunidad investigadora. La mayor parte de los trabajos que intentan mejorar la seguridad de estas redes se han centrado en proporcionar encaminamiento seguro, sistemas de reputación, anonimato de los usuarios, etc. Sin embargo, la adecuada gestión de las identidades es un requisito sumamente importante para proporcionar los servicios mencionados anteriormente. La existencia de nodos anónimos y la falta de una autoridad centralizada capaz de monitorizar (y/o penalizar) a los nodos hace que estos sistemas sean más vulnerables que otros a comportamientos maliciosos por parte de los usuarios. Además, esos comportamientos inadecuados no pueden ser detectados proporcionando únicamente confidencialidad de los datos, autenticación de los nodos, no repudio, etc. Las redes P2P estructuradas deberían seguir las siguientes primitivas de enrutamiento seguro: (1) mantenimiento seguro de las tablas de enrutamiento, (2) enrutamiento seguro de los mensajes, and (3) asignación segura de las identidades. Pero la primera de los dos primitivas depende de alguna forma de la tercera. Si las identidades de los nodos pueden ser elegidas por sus usuarios sin ningún tipo de control, muy probablemente aparecerán muchos problemas de funcionamiento y seguridad. Por lo tanto, de la misma forma que otras redes y servicios, las redes P2P estructuradas requieren de un control de acceso robusto para prevenir la presencia de atacantes potenciales, y un sistema robusto de asignación de identidades para garantizar su adecuado funcionamiento. En esta tesis, primero de todo analizamos el funcionamiento de las redes P2P estructuradas basadas en el uso de DHTs (Tablas de Hash Distribuidas), cómo gestionan las identidades de sus nodos, identificamos qué problemas de seguridad están relacionados con la identificación de los nodos y proponemos una serie de requisitos para generar identificadores de forma segura. Más adelante proponemos el uso de certificados implícitos para proporcionar más seguridad y explotar las mejoras en consumo de ancho de banda, almacenamiento y rendimiento que proporcionan estos certificados en comparación con los certificados explícitos. También hemos diseñado tres protocolos de asignación segura de identidades, los cuales evitan la mayor parte de los problemas identificados mientras mantienen el anonimato de los usuarios y la trazabilidad. Finalmente hemos analizado el funcionamiento de la mayoría de los mecanismos utilizados para distribuir datos de revocación en Internet, con especial interés en los sistemas propuestos para operar en redes P2P, y hemos diseñado un nuevo mecanismo para distribuir datos de revocación de forma más eficiente en redes P2P estructuradas.Postprint (published version

Applied Methuerstic computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC

The face-to-face principle: science, trust, democracy and the internet

Remote communication is replacing face-to-face interaction in ways that could be disastrous for democracy and for the idea of truth. This book shows why face-to-face communication still matters and why it is essential for the survival of pluralist democracies. The nature of face-to-face interactions in small groups and society as a whole, and from primary socialisation to specialist training, is examined via examples including field studies, network analysis, blockchain and the malicious use of disinformation. The deep trust that face-to-face enables is contrasted with the ‘illusion of intimacy’ created by remote communication. The example of science is particularly important. As the institution most directly concerned with creating truth, it demonstrates the essential role of face-to-face interaction in the creation of knowledge and the values that are needed to sustain this. In protecting and promoting democracy, the challenge is relearning how to trust scientific experts and the other elite institutions that form the essential checks and balances of democratic society. Here we offer the simple rule: trust expert institutions that depend on small group interaction and that endorse the values of pluralist democracy