15,416 research outputs found
Natural Strategic Abilities in Voting Protocols
Security properties are often focused on the technological side of the
system. One implicitly assumes that the users will behave in the right way to
preserve the property at hand. In real life, this cannot be taken for granted.
In particular, security mechanisms that are difficult and costly to use are
often ignored by the users, and do not really defend the system against
possible attacks.
Here, we propose a graded notion of security based on the complexity of the
user's strategic behavior. More precisely, we suggest that the level to which a
security property is satisfied can be defined in terms of (a) the
complexity of the strategy that the voter needs to execute to make
true, and (b) the resources that the user must employ on the way. The simpler
and cheaper to obtain , the higher the degree of security.
We demonstrate how the idea works in a case study based on an electronic
voting scenario. To this end, we model the vVote implementation of the \Pret
voting protocol for coercion-resistant and voter-verifiable elections. Then, we
identify "natural" strategies for the voter to obtain receipt-freeness, and
measure the voter's effort that they require. We also look at how hard it is
for the coercer to compromise the election through a randomization attack
Experimental Economics: Contributions, Recent Developments, and New Challenges
Although economics has long been considered as a non-experimental science, the development of experimental economics and behavioral economics is amazingly rapid and affects most fields of research. This paper first attempts at defining the main contributions of experiments to economics. It also identifies four main trends in the development of experimental research in economics. The third contribution of this paper is to identify the major theoretical and methodological challenges faced by behavioral and experimental economics.behavioral economy ; Experimental economics ; field experiment ; quantitative methods
Experimental Economics: Contributions, Recent Developments, and New Challenges
Although economics has long been considered as a non-experimental science, the development of experimental economics and behavioral economics is amazingly rapid and affects most fields of research. This paper first attempts at defining the main contributions of experiments to economics. It also identifies four main trends in the development of experimental research in economics. The third contribution of this paper is to identify the major theoretical and methodological challenges faced by behavioral and experimental economics.experimental economics; neuroeconomics; quantitative methods; field experiments
STV+Reductions: Towards Practical Verification of Strategic Ability Using Model Reductions
We present a substantially expanded version of our tool STV for strategy
synthesis and verification of strategic abilities. The new version adds
user-definable models and support for model reduction through partial order
reduction and checking for bisimulation
Strategic Abilities of Asynchronous Agents: Semantic Side Effects and How to Tame Them
Recently, we have proposed a framework for verification of agents' abilities
in asynchronous multi-agent systems, together with an algorithm for automated
reduction of models. The semantics was built on the modeling tradition of
distributed systems. As we show here, this can sometimes lead to
counterintuitive interpretation of formulas when reasoning about the outcome of
strategies. First, the semantics disregards finite paths, and thus yields
unnatural evaluation of strategies with deadlocks. Secondly, the semantic
representations do not allow to capture the asymmetry between proactive agents
and the recipients of their choices. We propose how to avoid the problems by a
suitable extension of the representations and change of the execution semantics
for asynchronous MAS. We also prove that the model reduction scheme still works
in the modified framework
Verification of the Socio-Technical Aspects of Voting: The Case of the Polish Postal Vote 2020
Voting procedures are designed and implemented by people, for people, and
with significant human involvement. Thus, one should take into account the
human factors in order to comprehensively analyze properties of an election and
detect threats. In particular, it is essential to assess how actions and
strategies of the involved agents (voters, municipal office employees, mail
clerks) can influence the outcome of other agents' actions as well as the
overall outcome of the election. In this paper, we present our first attempt to
capture those aspects in a formal multi-agent model of the Polish presidential
election 2020. The election marked the first time when postal vote was
universally available in Poland. Unfortunately, the voting scheme was prepared
under time pressure and political pressure, and without the involvement of
experts. This might have opened up possibilities for various kinds of ballot
fraud, in-house coercion, etc. We propose a preliminary scalable model of the
procedure in the form of a Multi-Agent Graph, and formalize selected integrity
and security properties by formulas of agent logics. Then, we transform the
models and formulas so that they can be input to the state-of-art model checker
Uppaal. The first series of experiments demonstrates that verification scales
rather badly due to the state-space explosion. However, we show that a recently
developed technique of user-friendly model reduction by variable abstraction
allows us to verify more complex scenarios
Information Security as Strategic (In)effectivity
Security of information flow is commonly understood as preventing any
information leakage, regardless of how grave or harmless consequences the
leakage can have. In this work, we suggest that information security is not a
goal in itself, but rather a means of preventing potential attackers from
compromising the correct behavior of the system. To formalize this, we first
show how two information flows can be compared by looking at the adversary's
ability to harm the system. Then, we propose that the information flow in a
system is effectively information-secure if it does not allow for more harm
than its idealized variant based on the classical notion of noninterference
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Information Behavior and Political Preferences
This article shows that citizens consider policy positions for the formation of their political preferences when they actively seek and find high-quality information, while they dismiss passively acquired and low-quality information. The study develops an extended theory of information and political preferences that incorporates the process of information acquisition and its connection with information quality. A novel experimental design separates the effects on political preferences due to information behavior as an activity from those due to selective exposure to information. The study applies this design in a laboratory experiment with a diverse group of participants using the example of issue voting and European integration in the context of the 2014 European Parliament elections
The Logic of Joint Ability in Two-Player Tacit Games
Logics of joint strategic ability have recently received attention, with arguably the most influential being those in a family that includes Coalition Logic (CL) and Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL). Notably, both CL and ATL bypass the epistemic issues that underpin Schelling-type coordination problems, by apparently relying on the meta-level assumption of (perfectly reliable) communication between cooperating rational agents. Yet such epistemic issues arise naturally in settings relevant to ATL and CL: these logics are standardly interpreted on structures where agents move simultaneously, opening the possibility that an agent cannot foresee the concurrent choices of other agents. In this paper we introduce a variant of CL we call Two-Player Strategic Coordination Logic (SCL2). The key novelty of this framework is an operator for capturing coalitional ability when the cooperating agents cannot share strategic information. We identify significant differences in the expressive power and validities of SCL2 and CL2, and present a sound and complete axiomatization for SCL2. We briefly address conceptual challenges when shifting attention to games with more than two players and stronger notions of rationality
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