Group-Oriented Fair Exchange of Signatures

In an Optimistic Fair Exchange (OFE) for digital signatures, two parties exchange their signatures fairly without requiring any online trusted third party. The third party is only involved when a dispute occurs. In all the previous work, OFE has been considered only in a setting where both of the communicating parties are individuals. There is little work discussing about the fair exchange between two \emph{groups} of users, though we can see that this is actually a common scenario in actual OFE applications. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of OFE, called \emph{Group-Oriented Optimistic Fair Exchange} (GOFE). A GOFE allows two users from two different groups to exchange signatures on behalf of their groups in a fair and anonymous manner. Although GOFE may be considered as a fair exchange for group signatures, it might be inefficient if it is constructed generically from a group signature scheme. Instead, we show that GOFE is \emph{backward compatible} to the Ambiguous OFE (AOFE). Also, we propose an efficient and concrete construction of GOFE, and prove its security under the security models we propose in this model. The security of the scheme relies on the decision linear assumption and strong Diffie-Hellman assumption under the random oracle model

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Secure web application development and global regulation

The World Wide Web (WWW) has been predominantly responsible for instigating radical paradigm transformations in today’s global information rich civilizations. Many societies have basic operational economical components that depend on Web enabled systems in order to support daily commercial activities. The acceptance of E-commerce as a valid channel for conducting business coupled with societal integration and dependence on Web enabled technology has instigated the development of local, national, and global efforts to regulate criminal activities on the World Wide Web. This paper makes two contributions. The first contribution is the high-level review of the United States and United Kingdom legislation that has developed from the escalation and integration of the World Wide Web into society. The second contribution is the support for the idea that legislative compatibility, in concert with an organization’s policy compatibility, needs to be acknowledged in secure Web application development methodologies

Novel Contract Signature based on Key Exchange

A contract signature is a particular form of digital multi-signature that only involves two signers. Contract signing plays a critical role in any business transaction, particularly in situations where the involved parties do not trust each other. One of the most significant concerns in exchange signatures is the fraudulent and unfair exchange, which occurs when one party gets the signature of another party without giving his own signature. In the view of these security concerns, this thesis presents a secure and fair contract signature scheme based on key exchange protocol. The security and protection of the proposed scheme is based on solving hard computational assumptions such as discrete logarithm problem (DLP). The proposed protocol is abuse-free. The proposed scheme targets to have lesser computational overhead and high-security features than existing scheme[1]. The proposed scheme has wide application in real life scenarios, such as in electronic cash system