Improving the Rules of the DPA Contest

A DPA contest has been launched at CHES 2008. The goal of this initiative is to make it possible for researchers to compare different side-channel attacks in an objective manner. For this purpose, a set of 80000 traces corresponding to the encryption of 80000 different plaintexts with the Data Encryption Standard and a fixed key has been made available. In this short note, we discuss the rules that the contest uses to rate the effectiveness of different distinguishers. We first describe practical examples of attacks in which these rules can be misleading. Then, we suggest an improved set of rules that can be implemented easily in order to obtain a better interpretation of the comparisons performed

Open Government. Total transparency and implementation in Italy and in the Sicilian Region

This short essay collects contributions and documentation relating to Rapporto sull'Open Government in Sicilia 2015 (the second Report on Open Government in Sicily), presented in March 31th, 2015 in the Department of Political Science and International Relationships department lecture hall at the University of Palermo. It is the result of the research carried out in the course compendium of European Administrative Law of the academic year of 2014-2015 and of the master's degree in Science of administration and complex organizations

The 2019 National General Election in Solomon Islands - A Personal Perspective: Navigating a Maze of Challenges

On 3 April this year, the people of Solomon Islands will go to the polls to elect their representatives in the national parliament for the next four years. The term ‘representatives’ is used loosely here as the typical member of parliament (MP) is elected with just over a third of the votes, meaning the majority of the electors did not in fact choose the winning candidate to represent them. This will be the tenth election since 1978 when the country gained full independence from the United Kingdom

Justice Deferred is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment in Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, deferred prosecution agreements are said to occupy an “important middle ground” between declining to prosecute on the one hand, and trials or guilty pleas on the other. A top DOJ official has declared that over the last decade, the agreements have become a “mainstay” of white collar criminal law enforcement; a prominent criminal law professor calls their increased use part of the “biggest change in corporate law enforcement policy in the last ten years.” However, despite deferred prosecution’s apparent rise in popularity among law enforcement officials, this Article sets forth the argument that this alternative dispute resolution vehicle makes a mockery of the criminal justice system by serving as a disturbing wellspring of unfairness, double standards, and potential abuse of power. This Article concludes by recommending that Congress pass legislation to halt the DOJ’s ability to use deferred prosecution agreements in the context of corporate criminal law enforcement. The Article suggests that if this goal cannot be realized, these agreements will continue to greatly compromise the pursuit of justice, consistency in the rule of law, and basic notions of fairness

Justice Deferred is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment in Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), deferred prosecution agreements are said to occupy an “important middle ground” between declining to prosecute on the one hand, and trials or guilty pleas on the other. A top DOJ official has declared that, over the last decade, the agreements have become a “mainstay” of white collar criminal law enforcement; a prominent criminal law professor calls their increased use part of the “biggest change in corporate law enforcement policy in the last ten years.” However, despite deferred prosecution’s apparent rise in popularity among law enforcement officials, the article sets forth the argument that this alternative dispute resolution vehicle makes a mockery of the criminal justice system by serving as a disturbing wellspring of unfairness, double standards, and potential abuse of power. The article concludes by recommending that Congress pass legislation to halt DOJ’s ability to use deferred prosecution agreements in the context of corporate criminal law enforcement. The article suggests that if this goal cannot be realized, these agreements will continue to greatly compromise the pursuit of justice, consistency in the rule of law, and basic notions of fairness

From data subjects to data suspects : challenging e-proctoring systems as a university practice

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

From data subjects to data suspects: challenging e-proctoring systems as a university practice

E-proctoring is a set of software and tools to monitor students’ behaviour during online examinations. Many universities have implemented this type of invigilation in response to the lockdowns during the pandemic to guarantee the validity and the integrity of exams. However, the intrusiveness of such technology into the students’ personal environment along with major accuracy problems (e.g., in authenticating black students) has attracted the scrutiny of various European data protection authorities and, more recently, equality bodies. In this paper, we critically approach the European normative framework available in countering the risks and situations of harms generated by e-proctoring through the lenses of data protection and anti-discrimination law. This work, in particular, is one of the first to systematise and analyse the corpus of online proctoring-related decisions that have emerged in the EU over the past three years. After an overview of the technical aspects of such technology and an outline of the legal issues debated in the literature, the paper will reconstruct and discuss the convergences and divergences in how courts and independent authorities have assessed the lawfulness of online invigilation tools. In our analysis, we observe that such instruments were evaluated differently depending on the concrete features implemented. However, with some notable exceptions, the General Data Protection Regulation and the anti-discrimination framework have largely proven helpful to combat the most intrusive forms of e-proctoring deployment or to mitigate their risks. Nevertheless, to ensure a safer and fairer educational environment, we conclude that a few crucial issues—including the effectiveness of the collective enforcement of rights, discriminatory effects for people not covered by a protected ground, and the governance of edTech within the university—should be further taken into account

Parallel Vectorized Algebraic AES in MATLAB for Rapid Prototyping of Encrypted Sensor Processing Algorithms and Database Analytics

The increasing use of networked sensor systems and networked databases has led to an increased interest in incorporating encryption directly into sensor algorithms and database analytics. MATLAB is the dominant tool for rapid prototyping of sensor algorithms and has extensive database analytics capabilities. The advent of high level and high performance Galois Field mathematical environments allows encryption algorithms to be expressed succinctly and efficiently. This work leverages the Galois Field primitives found the MATLAB Communication Toolbox to implement a mode of the Advanced Encrypted Standard (AES) based on first principals mathematics. The resulting implementation requires 100x less code than standard AES implementations and delivers speed that is effective for many design purposes. The parallel version achieves speed comparable to native OpenSSL on a single node and is sufficient for real-time prototyping of many sensor processing algorithms and database analytics.Comment: 6 pages; accepted to IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC) 201

Towards Financial Inclusion Through Digital Financial Services: Examining the Impact of the ‘Notice and Consent’ Privacy Mechanism

As smartphone ownership and Internet penetration in the Philippines are among the highest in the world, the Philippines is well-positioned to leverage on digital financial services as a means of alleviating poverty. However, with the increasingly active implementation of the Philippine Data Privacy Act (‘DPA’), such potential may not be realised. The privacy regulator, the National Privacy Commission, has consistently set ‘notice and consent’ as the dominant mechanism for data processing in the delivery of digital financial services, directly replicating the European General Data Protection (‘GDPR’) standard. Such replication not only disrupts the delivery and development of digital financial services in developing countries, but also inherently conflicts with the use of Big Data for innovation. Financial inclusion may be better achieved through a test-and-learn, industry-based approach supervised by the central bank. Further, regulation must be designed in proportion to the consumer risks digital financial services pose