Peeling Back the Onion of Cyber Espionage after Tallinn 2.0

Tallinn 2.0 represents an important advancement in the understanding of international law’s application to cyber operations below the threshold of force. Its provisions on cyber espionage will be instrumental to states in grappling with complex legal problems in the area of digital spying. The law of cyber espionage as outlined by Tallinn 2.0, however, is substantially based on rules that have evolved outside of the digital context, and there exist serious ambiguities and limitations in its framework. This Article will explore gaps in the legal structure and consider future options available to states in light of this underlying mismatch

Design and evaluation of blockchain-based security protocols

Many security protocols rely on the assumption that the trusted third party (TTP) will behave “as it should”. However, this assumption is difficult to justify in the real world. A TTP may become malicious due to its hidden interests or having been compromised. It is publicly acknowledged that a failed TTP can easily destroy the entire security protocol. This thesis aims to provide results on how to use blockchain technologies to mitigate TTP challenges and thereby secure existing cryptographic protocols. Firstly, we formally define a smart contract-based TTP (denoted as TTP-I) and give two security protocols based on such a type of TTP as concrete instances. In this approach, a smart contract can either complement a TTP’s actions or take over the entire functions of the existing TTP. This helps to obtain many security properties such as transparency and accountability. Smart contracts, however, are not adequate to replace TTP that is capable of maintaining secret information since all the states changed by TTP-I are in plaintext and publicly accessible. To fill the gap, we propose another type of TTP (denoted as TTP-II) that enables confidential executions by combining smart contracts and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). To achieve this goal, we first investigate the state-of-the-art TEE-aided confidential smart contracts and then explore their core mechanisms. We further apply TTP-II to a traceable credential system and an accountable decryption system. These systems are proved secure and feasible. However, since blockchain systems suffer from scalability and performance issues, the development of blockchain-based cryptographic protocols is inevitably retarded. At last, to make better blockchain systems, we provide two core mechanisms: a weak consensus algorithm and a delegatable payment protocol. The weak consensus algorithm allows parallel block generation, improving the performance and scalability of upper-layer blockchain systems. The delegatable payment protocol creates an offline payment channel, improving the payment speed. Both proposed algorithms have been practically implemented and systematically evaluated. Notably, the weak consensus algorithm has already been taken up by industries. Video abstract: https://youtu.be/rkAatxBRau

T.S. Eliot : a bibliography of T.S. Eliot criticism, 1987-2013.

This bibliography of scholarship related to the writer T.S. Eliot is arranged chronologically by year and alphabetically within each year. This bibliography contains 1624 entries. Select entries have been annotated. Where available, annotations have been taken from the research database and are enclosed in brackets ([ ]). Annotations that have been taken from the works themselves are enclosed by asterisks. Annotations written by the author of this thesis have no special characters to distinguish them from other annotations. An annotated bibliography of Eliot criticism is essential to keep up with the recent resurgence in Eliot studies. The last bibliography published regarding Eliot's works was Sebastian Knowles and Scott A. Leonard's T.S. Eliot: Man and Poet, Volume 2: An Annotated Bibliography of a Decade of T.S. Eliot Criticism, 1977-1986. This new bibliography creates a central location for Eliot research for the years of 1987-2013

Device profiling analysis in Device-Aware Network

As more and more devices with a variety of capabilities are Internet-capable, device independence becomes a big issue when we would like the information that we request to be correctly displayed. This thesis introduces and compares how existing standards create a profile that describes the device capabilities to achieve the goal of device independence. After acknowledging the importance of device independence, this paper utilizes the idea to introduce a Device-Aware Network (DAN). DAN provides the infrastructure support for device-content compatibility matching for data transmission. We identify the major components of the DAN architecture and issues associated with providing this new network service. A Device-Aware Network will improve the network's efficiency by preventing unusable data from consuming host and network resources. The device profile is the key issue to achieve this goal.http://archive.org/details/deviceprofilingn109451301Captain, Taiwan ArmyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

The Life and Legacy of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, and the Making of a Free People of Color Community in New Orleans.

This dissertation recovers the life of Marie Justine Sirnir Couvent and the Atlantic World she inhabited. Born in Africa around 1757, she was enslaved as a child and shipped to Saint-Domingue through the Bight of Benin in the 1760s. In the tumult of the Haitian Revolution, Couvent fled the island, along with tens of thousands of Saint-Domingue inhabitants. She resettled in New Orleans where she eventually died a free and wealthy slaveholder in 1837. Although illiterate, Couvent left property to establish a free black school in her will. L\u27Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents was founded on her land in 1847 and a school operated on the site for over 150 years. This unique example of free black philanthropy in New Orleans demonstrates how the city\u27s free people of color built a community through social ties, property, and collective institutions as the center of slavery shifted to the Deep South.;The dissertation traces both Couvent\u27s geographic movement from the Slave Coast through the French Caribbean to New Orleans and her social mobility from slave to free and from property to property owner. I argue that Couvent utilized social networks and property ownership to rebuild her life in New Orleans and participate in the development of a free people of color community. Couvent formed important social connections at all stages of her life that aided her survival of slavery and her relocation to Louisiana. Reconstructing her social networks in New Orleans reveals a shift from relationships centered on multiracial, Saint-Dominguan ties to a network dominated by free people of color, as Couvent became integrated into the city\u27s existing free black population. One way Couvent formed new relationships was through the acquisition and exchange of property. In addition to gaining economic security, Couvent bolstered her free status, created a family, and assisted in the creation of free black collective institutions through her property ownership. Taking into account her African birth and experience of enslavement in the Saint-Dominguan port city of Cap Francais, I analyze the different types of property Couvent owned separately to illustrate how property ownership facilitated as well as complicated the development of a free people of color community in New Orleans.;Her singular bequest and the remarkable endurance of the school have sustained Couvent\u27s legacy in New Orleans as a patron of African American education. A final chapter traces the history of the school(s) and the emphasis its administrators placed on education as a tool to challenge racial prejudice and combat inequality. Couvent remains within New Orleans\u27 public memory, but how she has been remembered varied over the twentieth century. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of the multiple interpretations of Couvent\u27s legacy

A Choice, Not an Echo: Polarization and the Transformation of the American Party System

This dissertation offers an intellectual and institutional history of party polarization and ideological realignment in the postwar United States. It treats the construction of an ideologically sorted party system as a political project carried out by conscious actors within and around the Democratic and Republican parties. The work of these activists, interest groups, and political elites helped to produce, by the last decades of the twentieth century, an unpredicted and still-continuing era of strong, polarized partisanship in American politics. In tracking their work, the dissertation also account for changing ideas about the party system over time, starting with an influential postwar scholarly doctrine that cast bipartisanship as a problem for which polarization would provide the solution.Histor