A Blockchain-based Approach for Data Accountability and Provenance Tracking

The recent approval of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes new data protection requirements on data controllers and processors with respect to the processing of European Union (EU) residents' data. These requirements consist of a single set of rules that have binding legal status and should be enforced in all EU member states. In light of these requirements, we propose in this paper the use of a blockchain-based approach to support data accountability and provenance tracking. Our approach relies on the use of publicly auditable contracts deployed in a blockchain that increase the transparency with respect to the access and usage of data. We identify and discuss three different models for our approach with different granularity and scalability requirements where contracts can be used to encode data usage policies and provenance tracking information in a privacy-friendly way. From these three models we designed, implemented, and evaluated a model where contracts are deployed by data subjects for each data controller, and a model where subjects join contracts deployed by data controllers in case they accept the data handling conditions. Our implementations show in practice the feasibility and limitations of contracts for the purposes identified in this paper

Attribute-Based Access Control Policy Generation Approach from Access Logs Based on CatBoost

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) has higher flexibility and better scalability than traditional access control and can be used for fine-grained access control of large-scale information systems. Although ABAC can depict a dynamic, complex access control policy, it is costly, tedious, and error-prone to manually define. Therefore, it is worth studying how to construct an ABAC policy efficiently and accurately. This paper proposes an ABAC policy generation approach based on the CatBoost algorithm to automatically learn policies from historical access logs. First, we perform a weighted reconstruction of the attributes for the policy to be mined. Second, we provide an ABAC rule extraction algorithm, rule pruning algorithm, and rule optimization algorithm, among which the rule pruning and rule optimization algorithms are used to improve the accuracy of the generated policies. In addition, we present a new policy quality indicator to measure the accuracy and simplicity of the generated policies. Finally, the results of an experiment conducted to validate the approach verify its feasibility and effectiveness

Performance Evaluation - Annual Report Year 3

This report describes the work done and results obtained in third year of the CATNETS project. Experiments carried out with the different configurations of the prototype are reported and simulation results are evaluated with the CATNETS metrics framework. The applicability of the Catallactic approach as market model for service and resource allocation in application layer networks is assessed based on the results and experience gained both from the prototype development and simulations. --Grid Computing

A Multicriteria Approach for the Evaluation of the Sustainability of Re-use of Historic Buildings in Venice

The paper presents a multiple criteria model for the evaluation of the sustainability of projects for the economic re-use of historical buildings in Venice. The model utilises the relevant parameters for the appraisal of sustainability, aggregated into three macro-indicators: intrinsic sustainability, context sustainability and economic-financial feasibility. The model has been calibrated by a panel of experts and tested on two reuse hypotheses of the Old Arsenal in Venice. The tests have proven the model to be a useful support in the early stages of evaluation of re-use projects, where economic improvements are to be combined with conservation, as it supports the identification of critical points and the selection of projects, thus providing not only a check-list of variables to be considered, but an appraisal of trade-offs between economic uses and requirements of conservation.Economic Reuse, Historical Building Conservation