Conversations on a probable future: interview with Beatrice Fazi

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Cryptography and Its Applications in Information Security

Nowadays, mankind is living in a cyber world. Modern technologies involve fast communication links between potentially billions of devices through complex networks (satellite, mobile phone, Internet, Internet of Things (IoT), etc.). The main concern posed by these entangled complex networks is their protection against passive and active attacks that could compromise public security (sabotage, espionage, cyber-terrorism) and privacy. This Special Issue “Cryptography and Its Applications in Information Security” addresses the range of problems related to the security of information in networks and multimedia communications and to bring together researchers, practitioners, and industrials interested by such questions. It consists of eight peer-reviewed papers, however easily understandable, that cover a range of subjects and applications related security of information

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

A macro-economic perspective on electronic commerce policy and strategy in government, corporate, small, medium and micro enterprises sectors : an exploratory analysis

M.Comm.This study aims to provide information on the macroeconomic impact of electronic commerce and its effects on business, consumer and government sectors. Electronic commerce as a new phenomenon has the potential to bring substantial benefits to government, businesses and consumers. Developed countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have had an experience of electronic commerce for the last ten years. Electronic commerce is the catchall phrase for many advances in technology centred on the Internet, and heralds fundamental changes for the world economy. The expansion of the Internet globally has made it an ideal means to conduct commercial transactions. The Internet is being used more and more to advertise and sell goods and service globally. Electronic commerce is an instrument that is handy to globalise trade among countries and nations. It has become highly possible to conduct business transactions with all parts of the world that have access to Internet, without being physically there. The transactions take place technologically. The use of Internet and the World Wide Web is creating a revolution in the manner in which business transactions are conducted. The increase in the number of users is taking place at a rapid pace, especially in the developed economies. It is estimated that there are now more than 150 million users, and the figure increases by more than 50 000 on a daily basis (UNCTAD, 1999:55). More than half of the current user population is located in the United States of America, but the geographical spread is fast diversifying. Even developing countries are now having an access to the Internet. Revenue attributed to electronic commerce is still relatively small though it is projected to grow over the years. Empirical evidence about the use of electronic commerce is largely confined to developed countries, though developing countries are now using it. It shows that in several sectors, which include financial services, tourism, books, music and entertainment industry, the digital revolution is spreading rapidly. This also shows that many aspects of governments' dealings with communities, international project management and consultancy work are increasingly being facilitated by electronic operations. The United States has developed the Global Information Infrastructure, which is seen as a global marketplace, to enable it to reach every comer of the globe on trade. This development is based on the following principles:- • Private sector leadership The private sector is leading the development of electronic commerce and the Internet, though the government assisted with bulk financing. Innovation, expanded services, broader participation, and lower prices will arise in a market-driven arena, not in an environment that operates as a regulated industry. The American government is encouraging industry self-regulation whenever appropriate, and supports all initiatives and efforts of the private sector to develop mechanisms to facilitate the successful operation of the Internet and electronic commerce. • Government to avoid undue restrictions on electronic commerce The government has not intervened when business transactions on goods and services are effected across the Internet. The government is of the view that intervention and unnecessary regulation of commercial activities will distort the development of an electronic marketplace by decreasing supply and raising the cost of goods and services for consumers globally. The United States government has further undertaken to refrain from imposing new regulations, bureaucratic procedures, or taxes and tariffs on commercial activities that take place via the Internet. • Minimum government intervention when necessary The government will intervene to support and enforce a predictable, consistent and simple legal environment for commerce. In some areas it will be necessary for government to play a minimal role where consumers have to be protected

MAPPING THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT: LEGAL ASPECTS OF MODULARIZATION AND DIGITALIZATION

The Article highlights the language of the digital and the principle of modularization as the basic concepts which the further development of the information environment will have to pivot around, regardless of how conflicts between freedom and control are temporarily solved. Perceiving both the computer and the Internet as complex systems, the authors look at how modular design of these systems freed the functionality of applications from the physicality of infrastructures, describe the evolutionary gains adhering to modularity, and how to preserve them - elaborating on the issues of access to the cable platform for broadband Internet and to virtual networks for computer technology. Their second focus shows how digitalization of information makes possible the merger of content and its protection. Especially through the use of DRM systems, private actors can create right enforcement mechanisms independent of the State. The legal system therefore faces new and more complex relations between private will and public sovereignty. In such a merged system it is harder to maintain freedom - much like in the fusion of function and infrastructure

Data-Driven and Game-Theoretic Approaches for Privacy

abstract: In the past few decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the boundary between public and private information. The application of information technology and electronic communications allow service providers (businesses) to collect a large amount of data. However, this ``data collection" process can put the privacy of users at risk and also lead to user reluctance in accepting services or sharing data. This dissertation first investigates privacy sensitive consumer-retailers/service providers interactions under different scenarios, and then focuses on a unified framework for various information-theoretic privacy and privacy mechanisms that can be learned directly from data. Existing approaches such as differential privacy or information-theoretic privacy try to quantify privacy risk but do not capture the subjective experience and heterogeneous expression of privacy-sensitivity. The first part of this dissertation introduces models to study consumer-retailer interaction problems and to better understand how retailers/service providers can balance their revenue objectives while being sensitive to user privacy concerns. This dissertation considers the following three scenarios: (i) the consumer-retailer interaction via personalized advertisements; (ii) incentive mechanisms that electrical utility providers need to offer for privacy sensitive consumers with alternative energy sources; (iii) the market viability of offering privacy guaranteed free online services. We use game-theoretic models to capture the behaviors of both consumers and retailers, and provide insights for retailers to maximize their profits when interacting with privacy sensitive consumers. Preserving the utility of published datasets while simultaneously providing provable privacy guarantees is a well-known challenge. In the second part, a novel context-aware privacy framework called generative adversarial privacy (GAP) is introduced. Inspired by recent advancements in generative adversarial networks, GAP allows the data holder to learn the privatization mechanism directly from the data. Under GAP, finding the optimal privacy mechanism is formulated as a constrained minimax game between a privatizer and an adversary. For appropriately chosen adversarial loss functions, GAP provides privacy guarantees against strong information-theoretic adversaries. Both synthetic and real-world datasets are used to show that GAP can greatly reduce the adversary's capability of inferring private information at a small cost of distorting the data.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Privacy Impact on Generalized Nash Equilibrium in Peer-to-Peer Electricity Market

We consider a peer-to-peer electricity market, where agents hold private information that they might not want to share. The problem is modeled as a noncooperative communication game, which takes the form of a Generalized Nash Equilibrium Problem, where the agents determine their randomized reports to share with the other market players, while anticipating the form of the peer-to-peer market equilibrium. In the noncooperative game, each agent decides on the deterministic and random parts of the report, such that (a) the distance between the deterministic part of the report and the truthful private information is bounded and (b) the expectation of the privacy loss random variable is bounded. This allows each agent to change her privacy level. We characterize the equilibrium of the game, prove the uniqueness of the Variational Equilibria and provide a closed form expression of the privacy price. In addition, we provide a closed form expression to measure the impact of the privacy preservation caused by inclusion of random noise and deterministic deviation from agents' true values. Numerical illustrations are presented on the 14-bus IEEE network