Managing malicious transactions in mobile database systems

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on March 15, 2013Thesis advisor: Vijay KumarVitaIncludes bibliographic references (p. 53-55)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2012Database security is one of the most important issues for any organization, especially for financial institutions such as banks. Protecting database from external threats is relatively easier and a number of effective security schemes are available to organizations. Unfortunately, this is not so in the case of threats from insiders. Existing security schemes for such threats are some variation of external schemes that are not able to provide desirable security level. As a result, still authorized users (insiders) manage to misuse their privileges for fulfilling their malicious intent. It is a fact that most external security breaches succeed mainly with the help of insiders. An example for an insider is the Enron scandal of 2001 which led to bankruptcy of Enron Corporation. The firm was widely regarded as one of the most innovative, fastest growing and best managed business in the United States. When Enron filed for bankruptcy its share prices fall from US$90 to$1 causing a loss of nearly $11 billion dollar to its stakeholders. Financial officers and executives misled outside investors, auditors and Enron's board of directors about corporation's net income and liabilities. These insiders kept reported income and reported cash flow up, asset value inflated and liabilities off the book to meet Wall Street expectations. Enron's$63.4 billion in assets made it the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history at that time. Existing security policies are inadequate to prevent the attacks from insiders. Current database protections mechanisms do not fully protect occurrence of these malicious transactions. These requires human intervention in some form or other to detect malicious transactions. In a database, a transaction can affect the execution of the subsequesnt transactions thereby spreading the damage and hence making the attack recovery more complex. The problem of malicious attack becomes more pronounced when we are dealing with mobile database systems. This thesis proposes a solution to mitigate insider attack by identifying such malicious transactions. It develops a formal framework for characterizing mobile transaction by identifying essential components like order of data access, order of operations and user profile.Introduction -- Mobile database system -- Research problem -- Solution and scheme -- Simulation and results -- Future work -- Conclusio

Identifying the influencing factors in sustainable tea supply in the Sri Lankan tea industry

In monetary terms, the Sri Lankan tea industry was until 1995 consistently the country’s largest exporting element. The tea industry has always played an important role in the Sri Lankan economy, because it uses mainly local resources and over 20% of the population directly depends on it. The Sri Lankan tea industry also plays a significant role in the global tea industry. For over three decades it was the largest tea exporter into the global supply chain (in both value and volume). However, Sri Lanka is currently ranked as the fourth-largest tea exporter in the world. Tea-production volume has stagnated at around 300,000 metric tonnes in Sri Lanka, while at the same time global production volumes have increased considerably in other tea-producing countries. Production costs have increased in real terms globally. Importantly, Sri Lanka has the highest production cost among all producers. Thus the sustainability of the tea industry in Sri Lanka is at risk. Previous research has indicated that the characteristics in the agricultural sector, including tea production, are now similar to many characteristics of the manufacturing sector. However, this has not yet been fully investigated in the Sri Lankan tea sector. Even though some research has explored supply chain management aspects of agricultural products such as coffee, potatoes and cocoa, little attention has been paid to the tea industry. The main objective of this research was to explore the tea supply chain, specifically focusing on the Sri Lankan tea industry. This research identified the influencing factors on a sustainable tea supply chain by mapping the supply chain for both smallholders and large-scale producers