Performance trade-offs on a secure multi-party relational database

The privacy of information is an increasing concern of software applications users. This concern was caused by attacks to cloud services over the last few years, that have leaked confidential information such as passwords, emails and even private pictures. Once the information is leaked, the users and software applications are powerless to contain the spread of information and its misuse. With databases as a central component of applications that store almost all of their data, they are one of the most common targets of attacks. However, typical deployments of databases do not leverage security mechanisms to stop attacks and do not apply cryptographic schemes to protect data. This issue has been tackled by multiple secure databases that provide trade-offs between security, query capabilities and performance. Despite providing stronger security guarantees, the proposed solutions still entrust their data to a single entity that can be corrupted or hacked. Secret sharing can solve this problem by dividing data in multiple secrets and storing each secret at a different location. The division is done in such a way that if one location is hacked, no information can be leaked. Depending on the protocols used to divide data, functions can be computed over this data through secure protocols that do not disclose information or actually know which values are being calculated. We propose a SQL database prototype capable of offering a trade-off between security and query latency by using a different secure protocol. An evaluation of the protocols is also performed, showing that our most relaxed protocol has an improvement of 5% on the query latency time over the original protocol.This work was partially funded by project ”NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000016”, financed by the North Portugal Re-gional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under thePORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through theEuropean Regional Development Fund (ERD

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC