Legal Aid\u27s Once and Future Role for Impacting the Criminalization of Poverty and the War on the Poor

Recent media coverage and advocacy efforts on behalf of individuals subjected to criminal sanctions as a result of their poverty status has resulted in increased attention on this nation’s troubled history of oppression and control of the poor and people of color. At the federal, state, and local levels, a growing number of policies create criminal sanctions for poverty-related circumstances. These, in turn, result in collateral consequences that unfairly affect those who lack the means to afford their criminal justice experience (i.e., processing costs, fees, and fines), or affect their ability to access employment, housing, or other basic services. These policies also disproportionately affect people of color, and the origins of many of these policies share a twisted history in decades of racial oppression and discrimination. In many respects, these criminal sanctions and collateral consequences lay on the surface of deep-seated social and economic ills that have been neglected, festering over decades and breaking out now in events over the past two years from Ferguson to Baltimore. Challenging these entrenched social and economic inequities will be necessary in order to produce real change for communities struggling against the criminalization of poverty. Legal challenges must be coordinated with community-based social movements emerging in these communities in order to confront the barriers to opportunity and structures that perpetuate inequities. Legal Aid programs have a historical grounding in this type of community-based impact advocacy work and are uniquely positioned to work together with community groups to bring about meaningful change

A Formal Framework for Concrete Reputation Systems

In a reputation-based trust-management system, agents maintain information about the past behaviour of other agents. This information is used to guide future trust-based decisions about interaction. However, while trust management is a component in security decision-making, many existing reputation-based trust-management systems provide no formal security-guarantees. In this extended abstract, we describe a mathematical framework for a class of simple reputation-based systems. In these systems, decisions about interaction are taken based on policies that are exact requirements on agents’ past histories. We present a basic declarative language, based on pure-past linear temporal logic, intended for writing simple policies. While the basic language is reasonably expressive (encoding e.g. Chinese Wall policies) we show how one can extend it with quantification and parameterized events. This allows us to encode other policies known from the literature, e.g., ‘one-out-of-k’. The problem of checking a history with respect to a policy is efficient for the basic language, and tractable for the quantified language when policies do not have too many variables

A Logical Framework for Reputation Systems

Reputation systems are meta systems that record, aggregate and distribute information about the past behaviour of principals in an application. Typically, these applications are large-scale open distributed systems where principals are virtually anonymous, and (a priori) have no knowledge about the trustworthiness of each other. Reputation systems serve two primary purposes: helping principals decide whom to trust, and providing an incentive for principals to well-behave. A logical policy-based framework for reputation systems is presented. In the framework, principals specify policies which state precise requirements on the past behaviour of other principals that must be fulfilled in order for interaction to take place. The framework consists of a formal model of behaviour, based on event structures; a declarative logical language for specifying properties of past behaviour; and efficient dynamic algorithms for checking whether a particular behaviour satisfies a property from the language. It is shown how the framework can be extended in several ways, most notably to encompass parameterized events and quantification over parameters. In an extended application, it is illustrated how the framework can be applied for dynamic history-based access control for safe execution of unknown and untrusted programs

Safer in the Clouds (Extended Abstract)

We outline the design of a framework for modelling cloud computing systems.The approach is based on a declarative programming model which takes the form of a lambda-calculus enriched with suitable mechanisms to express and enforce application-level security policies governing usages of resources available in the clouds. We will focus on the server side of cloud systems, by adopting a pro-active approach, where explicit security policies regulate server's behaviour.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2010, arXiv:1010.530

A Secure and Fair Resource Sharing Model for Community Clouds

Cloud computing has gained a lot of importance and has been one of the most discussed segment of today\u27s IT industry. As enterprises explore the idea of using clouds, concerns have emerged related to cloud security and standardization. This thesis explores whether the Community Cloud Deployment Model can provide solutions to some of the concerns associated with cloud computing. A secure framework based on trust negotiations for resource sharing within the community is developed as a means to provide standardization and security while building trust during resource sharing within the community. Additionally, a model for fair sharing of resources is developed which makes the resource availability and usage transparent to the community so that members can make informed decisions about their own resource requirements based on the resource usage and availability within the community. Furthermore, the fair-share model discusses methods that can be employed to address situations when the demand for a resource is higher than the resource availability in the resource pool. Various methods that include reduction in the requested amount of resource, early release of the resources and taxing members have been studied, Based on comparisons of these methods along with the advantages and disadvantages of each model outlined, a hybrid method that only taxes members for unused resources is developed. All these methods have been studied through simulations

A decidable policy language for history-based transaction monitoring

Online trading invariably involves dealings between strangers, so it is important for one party to be able to judge objectively the trustworthiness of the other. In such a setting, the decision to trust a user may sensibly be based on that user's past behaviour. We introduce a specification language based on linear temporal logic for expressing a policy for categorising the behaviour patterns of a user depending on its transaction history. We also present an algorithm for checking whether the transaction history obeys the stated policy. To be useful in a real setting, such a language should allow one to express realistic policies which may involve parameter quantification and quantitative or statistical patterns. We introduce several extensions of linear temporal logic to cater for such needs: a restricted form of universal and existential quantification; arbitrary computable functions and relations in the term language; and a "counting" quantifier for counting how many times a formula holds in the past. We then show that model checking a transaction history against a policy, which we call the history-based transaction monitoring problem, is PSPACE-complete in the size of the policy formula and the length of the history. The problem becomes decidable in polynomial time when the policies are fixed. We also consider the problem of transaction monitoring in the case where not all the parameters of actions are observable. We formulate two such "partial observability" monitoring problems, and show their decidability under certain restrictions

Dynamic User Role Assignment in Remote Access Control

The Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model has been widely applied to a single domain in which users are known to the administrative unit of that domain, beforehand. However, the application of the conventional RBAC model for remote access control scenarios is not straightforward. In such scenarios, the access requestor is outside of the provider domain and thus, the user population is heterogeneous and dynamic. Here, the main challenge is to automatically assign users to appropriate roles of the provider domain. Trust management has been proposed as a supporting technique to solve the problem of remote access control. The key idea is to establish a mutual trust between the requestor and provider based on credentials they exchange. However, a credential doesn't convey any information about the behavior of its holder during the time it is being used. Furthermore, in terms of privileges granted to the requestor, existing trust management systems are either too restrictive or not restrictive enough. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic user-role assignment approach for remote access control, where a stranger requests for access from a provider domain. Our approach has two advantages compared to the existing dynamic user-role assignment techniques. Firstly, it addresses the principle of least privilege without degrading the efficiency of the access control system. Secondly, it takes into account both credentials and the past behavior of the requestor in such a way that he cannot compensate for the lack of necessary credentials by having a good past behavior