Trusted operational scenarios - Trust building mechanisms and strategies for electronic marketplaces.

This document presents and describes the trusted operational scenarios, resulting from the research and work carried out in Seamless project. The report presents identified collaboration habits of small and medium enterprises with low e-skills, trust building mechanisms and issues as main enablers of online business relationships on the electronic marketplace, a questionnaire analysis of the level of trust acceptance and necessity of trust building mechanisms, a proposal for the development of different strategies for the different types of trust mechanisms and recommended actions for the SEAMLESS project or other B2B marketplaces.trust building mechanisms, trust, B2B networks, e-marketplaces

Non-Transferable Proxy Re-Encryption Scheme

SEC8: Selected topics in Information SecurityA proxy re-encryption (PRE) scheme allows a proxy to re-encrypt a ciphertext for Alice (delegator) to a ciphertext for Bob (delegatee) without seeing the underlying plaintext. However, existing PRE schemes generally suffer from at least one of the followings. Some schemes fail to provide the non-transferable property in which the proxy and the delegatee can collude to further delegate the decryption right to anyone. This is the main open problem left for PRE schemes. Other schemes assume the existence of a fully trusted private key generator (PKG) to generate the re-encryption key to be used by the proxy for re-encrypting a given ciphertext for a target delegatee. But this poses two problems in PRE schemes if the PKG is malicious: the PKG in their schemes may decrypt both original ciphertexts and re-encrypted ciphertexts (referred as the key escrow problem); and the PKG can generate reencryption key for arbitrary delegatees without permission from the delegator (we refer to it as the PKG despotism problem). In this paper, we propose the first non-transferable proxy re-encryption scheme which successfully achieves the nontransferable property. We show that the new scheme solved the PKG despotism problem and key escrow problem as well. © 2012 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Identifying the Potential for Results-Based Financing for Sanitation

Results-based financing (RBF) covers a number of financial tools in which funding is contingent on achieving specified outcomes. RBF has been used across various sectors of international development to some success and this paper explores the potential for applying it to sanitation. In doing so, the author considers the presence of misaligned incentives in the sanitation sector, and then walks us through various points along the value chain at which RBF could be employed. Design and implementation of such strategies requires careful consideration of potential challenges, including how to avoid creating perverse incentives

A Comprehensive Survey on Signcryption Security Mechanisms in Wireless Body Area Networks

WBANs (Wireless Body Area Networks) are frequently depicted as a paradigm shift in healthcare from traditional to modern E-Healthcare. The vitals of the patient signs by the sensors are highly sensitive, secret, and vulnerable to numerous adversarial attacks. Since WBANs is a real-world application of the healthcare system, it’s vital to ensure that the data acquired by the WBANs sensors is secure and not accessible to unauthorized parties or security hazards. As a result, effective signcryption security solutions are required for the WBANs’ success and widespread use. Over the last two decades, researchers have proposed a slew of signcryption security solutions to achieve this goal. The lack of a clear and unified study in terms of signcryption solutions can offer a bird’s eye view of WBANs. Based on the most recent signcryption papers, we analyzed WBAN’s communication architecture, security requirements, and the primary problems in WBANs to meet the aforementioned objectives. This survey also includes the most up to date signcryption security techniques in WBANs environments. By identifying and comparing all available signcryption techniques in the WBANs sector, the study will aid the academic community in understanding security problems and causes. The goal of this survey is to provide a comparative review of the existing signcryption security solutions and to analyze the previously indicated solution given for WBANs. A multi-criteria decision-making approach is used for a comparative examination of the existing signcryption solutions. Furthermore, the survey also highlights some of the public research issues that researchers must face to develop the security features of WBANs.publishedVersio

Contracts Ex Machina

Smart contracts are self-executing digital transactions using decentralized cryptographic mechanisms for enforcement. They were theorized more than twenty years ago, but the recent development of Bitcoin and blockchain technologies has rekindled excitement about their potential among technologists and industry. Startup companies and major enterprises alike are now developing smart contract solutions for an array of markets, purporting to offer a digital bypass around traditional contract law. For legal scholars, smart contracts pose a significant question: Do smart contracts offer a superior solution to the problems that contract law addresses? In this article, we aim to understand both the potential and the limitations of smart contracts. We conclude that smart contracts offer novel possibilities, may significantly alter the commercial world, and will demand new legal responses. But smart contracts will not displace contract law. Understanding why not brings into focus the essential role of contract law as a remedial institution. In this way, smart contracts actually illuminate the role of contract law more than they obviate it