Dynamic Role-Based Access Control for Decentralized Applications

Access control management is an integral part of maintaining the security of an application. Although there has been significant work in the field of cloud access control mechanisms, however, with the advent of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), on-chain access control management frameworks hardly exist. Existing access control management mechanisms are tightly coupled with the business logic, resulting in governance issues, non-coherent with existing Identity Management Solutions, low security, and compromised usability. We propose a novel framework to implement dynamic role-based access control for decentralized applications (dApps). The framework allows for managing access control on a dApp, which is completely decoupled from the business application and integrates seamlessly with any dApps. The smart contract architecture allows for the independent management of business logic and execution of access control policies. It also facilitates secure, low cost, and a high degree of flexibility of access control management. The proposed framework promotes decentralized governance of access control policies and efficient smart contract upgrades. We also provide quantitative and qualitative metrics for the efficacy and efficiency of the framework. Any Turing complete smart contract programming language is an excellent fit to implement the framework. We expect this framework to benefit enterprise and non-enterprise dApps and provide greater access control flexibility and effective integration with traditional and state of the art identity management solutions.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Intention-oriented programming support for runtime adaptive autonomic cloud-based applications

The continuing high rate of advances in information and communication systems technology creates many new commercial opportunities but also engenders a range of new technical challenges around maximising systems' dependability, availability, adaptability, and auditability. These challenges are under active research, with notable progress made in the support for dependable software design and management. Runtime support, however, is still in its infancy and requires further research. This paper focuses on a requirements model for the runtime execution and control of an intention-oriented Cloud-Based Application. Thus, a novel requirements modelling process referred to as Provision, Assurance and Auditing, and an associated framework are defined and developed where a given system's non/functional requirements are modelled in terms of intentions and encoded in a standard open mark-up language. An autonomic intention-oriented programming model, using the Neptune language, then handles its deployment and execution. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Universal neural field computation

Turing machines and G\"odel numbers are important pillars of the theory of computation. Thus, any computational architecture needs to show how it could relate to Turing machines and how stable implementations of Turing computation are possible. In this chapter, we implement universal Turing computation in a neural field environment. To this end, we employ the canonical symbologram representation of a Turing machine obtained from a G\"odel encoding of its symbolic repertoire and generalized shifts. The resulting nonlinear dynamical automaton (NDA) is a piecewise affine-linear map acting on the unit square that is partitioned into rectangular domains. Instead of looking at point dynamics in phase space, we then consider functional dynamics of probability distributions functions (p.d.f.s) over phase space. This is generally described by a Frobenius-Perron integral transformation that can be regarded as a neural field equation over the unit square as feature space of a dynamic field theory (DFT). Solving the Frobenius-Perron equation yields that uniform p.d.f.s with rectangular support are mapped onto uniform p.d.f.s with rectangular support, again. We call the resulting representation \emph{dynamic field automaton}.Comment: 21 pages; 6 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1204.546

The Source of Magic

This paper is an attempt to show that a large part of Western society no longer operates on the rationalist principles that most of us thought it did, but that it instead runs by magic more akin to that in fantasy works. The term ‘magic’ is not meant metaphorically or in science fiction author Arthur C Clarke’s sense that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Clarke 1962), but is meant literally in the sense that Frazer (1890, republished 2003) used the term. This means that instead of trying to understand the present and near future by looking at the works of science fiction creators who put forth a rationalist and technological view of the world, we would understand the future better by looking to the fantasy of authors such as Jack Vance, Matthew Hughes, Ursula Le Guin, Piers Anthony and Michael Moorcock. This magic is manifested through magical thinking and irrational behaviour, where the majority of us use literal spells and incantations in our daily interactions with each other in the networked world, and where we worship capricious gods; most importantly, those spells, incantations and worship actually work, and those gods have actually come to exist. This paper will also show just how the spread of the computer technology propounded by scientists, technologists and SF writers has inevitably led to the creation of this irrational and magical world. This is partly because of limitations built-in to the formal systems on which these systems are based, leading to an extreme example of the law of unintended consequences. Finally, the paper will explain the mechanism by which magic is literally becoming real by reference to Frazer’s two laws of magic: the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion

Human-Aided Artificial Intelligence: Or, How to Run Large Computations in Human Brains? Towards a Media Sociology of Machine Learning

Today, artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, is structurally dependent on human participation. Technologies such as Deep Learning (DL) leverage networked media infrastructures and human-machine interaction designs to harness users to provide training and verification data. The emergence of DL is therefore based on a fundamental socio-technological transformation of the relationship between humans and machines. Rather than simulating human intelligence, DL-based AIs capture human cognitive abilities, so they are hybrid human-machine apparatuses. From a perspective of media philosophy and social-theoretical critique, I differentiate five types of “media technologies of capture” in AI apparatuses and analyze them as forms of power relations between humans and machines. Finally, I argue that the current hype about AI implies a relational and distributed understanding of (human/artificial) intelligence, which I categorize under the term “cybernetic AI”. This form of AI manifests in socio-technological apparatuses that involve new modes of subjectivation, social control and discrimination of users

Mission Planner for Solar Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s), initially used for military applications, have become increasingly attractive for civilian purposes. The use of this type of aircraft has grown exponentially in recent years, both for professional and recreational purposes, due to the numerous advantages they present. The increasingly demand of UAV led to an increase in investment, namely in the development of solar powered UAVs. Nowadays, with the arising of this type of UAV’s, the mission planners have to start to be updated with new features considering UAV’s with photovoltaic solar panels. This way, the present work describes the development and validation of a mission planner for solar powered UAV’s, capable of planning and optimizing a mission given a initial guess of waypoints parameters (latitude, longitude, altitude and airspeed), considering real weather forecast and terrain elevation data. For this, the mission planner considers several mathematical models, required for the calculation of the mission performance, and a sequential quadratic programming algorithm to optimize the initial mission. After it describes the theoretical models, a practical application of the mission planner is done in order to verify its performance. Regarding its validation, several results divided by topics of interest are presented and discussed, concluding that the mission planner works efficiently, regarding the mission planning, even though, it has some aspects to be improved.Os veículos aéreos não tripulados (UAV’s), inicialmente utilizados para aplicações militares, tornaram-se cada vez mais atraentes para fins civis. A utilização deste tipo de aeronave tem crescido exponencialmente nos últimos anos, tanto para fins profissionais como recreativos, devido às inúmeras vantagens que apresentam. Este aumento da procura levou a um crescente investimento no setor, nomeadamente nos UAVs movidos a energia solar, que hoje em dia já ocupam uma pequena fatia do mercado. No entanto, com o aparecimento deste tipo de UAV’s, os softwares de planeamento de missões precisam de ser atualizados de forma a terem em conta a energia fornecida pelo sol. Desta forma, o presente trabalho descreve o desenvolvimento e validação de um planeador de missões para UAV’s movidos a energia solar, capaz de planear e otimizar uma missão, considerando uma estimativa inicial dos parâmetros de cada waypoint (latitude, longitude, altitude e velocidade), e ainda considerando dados reais de previsão meteorologica e elevação de terreno. Para isso, o planeador de missões considera vários modelos matemáticos, necessários para o cálculo do desempenho da missão, e um algoritmo quadrático sequencial de forma a otimizar a missão inicial. Depois de descrever os modelos teóricos, uma aplicação prática do planeador de missão é feita com o objetivo de verificar o seu desempenho. Em relação à validação, vários resultados divididos por tópicos de interesse são apresentados e discutidos, concluindo: é eficiente em relação ao planeamento de missões, ainda assim, tendo alguns aspetos a serem melhorados

Project Final Report Final Publishable Summary Report

This document is the final publishable summary report, part of the CONNECT final report