267 research outputs found

    Enhancing Key Digital Literacy Skills: Information Privacy, Information Security, and Copyright/Intellectual Property

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    Key Messages Background Knowledge and skills in the areas of information security, information privacy, and copyright/intellectual property rights and protection are of key importance for organizational and individual success in an evolving society and labour market in which information is a core resource. Organizations require skilled and knowledgeable professionals who understand risks and responsibilities related to the management of information privacy, information security, and copyright/intellectual property. Professionals with this expertise can assist organizations to ensure that they and their employees meet requirements for the privacy and security of information in their care and control, and in order to ensure that neither the organization nor its employees contravene copyright provisions in their use of information. Failure to meet any of these responsibilities can expose the organization to reputational harm, legal action and/or financial loss. Context Inadequate or inappropriate information management practices of individual employees are at the root of organizational vulnerabilities with respect to information privacy, information security, and information ownership issues. Users demonstrate inadequate skills and knowledge coupled with inappropriate practices in these areas, and similar gaps at the organizational level are also widely documented. National and international regulatory frameworks governing information privacy, information security, and copyright/intellectual property are complex and in constant flux, placing additional burden on organizations to keep abreast of relevant regulatory and legal responsibilities. Governance and risk management related to information privacy, security, and ownership are critical to many job categories, including the emerging areas of information and knowledge management. There is an increasing need for skilled and knowledgeable individuals to fill organizational roles related to information management, with particular growth in these areas within the past 10 years. Our analysis of current job postings in Ontario supports the demand for skills and knowledge in these areas. Key Competencies We have developed a set of key competencies across a range of areas that responds to these needs by providing a blueprint for the training of information managers prepared for leadership and strategic positions. These competencies are identified in the full report. Competency areas include: conceptual foundations risk assessment tools and techniques for threat responses communications contract negotiation and compliance evaluation and assessment human resources management organizational knowledge management planning; policy awareness and compliance policy development project managemen

    Secure equality testing protocols in the two-party setting

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    Protocols for securely testing the equality of two encrypted integers are common building blocks for a number of proposals in the literature that aim for privacy preservation. Being used repeatedly in many cryptographic protocols, designing efficient equality testing protocols is important in terms of computation and communication overhead. In this work, we consider a scenario with two parties where party A has two integers encrypted using an additively homomorphic scheme and party B has the decryption key. Party A would like to obtain an encrypted bit that shows whether the integers are equal or not but nothing more. We propose three secure equality testing protocols, which are more efficient in terms of communication, computation or both compared to the existing work. To support our claims, we present experimental results, which show that our protocols achieve up to 99% computation-wise improvement compared to the state-of-the-art protocols in a fair experimental set-up

    SoK: A Consensus Taxonomy in the Blockchain Era

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    Consensus (a.k.a. Byzantine agreement) is arguably one of the most fundamental problems in distributed systems, playing also an important role in the area of cryptographic protocols as the enabler of a (secure) broadcast functionality. While the problem has a long and rich history and has been analyzed from many different perspectives, recently, with the advent of blockchain protocols like Bitcoin, it has experienced renewed interest from a much wider community of researchers and has seen its application expand to various novel settings. One of the main issues in consensus research is the many different variants of the problem that exist as well as the various ways the problem behaves when different setup, computational assumptions and network models are considered. In this work we perform a systematization of knowledge in the landscape of consensus research starting with the original formulation in the early 1980s up to the present blockchain-based new class of consensus protocols. Our work is a roadmap for studying the consensus problem under its many guises, classifying the way it operates in many settings and highlighting the exciting new applications that have emerged in the blockchain era

    A Secret Sharing Scheme for Preventing the Cheaters from Acquiring the Secret

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    In this paper, we propose a secret sharing scheme which prevents the cheaters from recovering the secret when the honest participants cannot, with high probability. The scheme is a (k, n) threshold scheme providing protection against less than k cheaters. It is efficient in terms of share sizes for the participants. Furthermore the total size of the individual shares per participant is less than twice the size of the secret itself. The cheaters can do successful cheating with a probability 1/t, which can be adjusted without significantly increasing the total size of the individual shares. Such a scheme can be deployed in thin client fat server systems where the server has reasonable computational power and there is a high level of mistrust among the users

    Efficient Statistical Asynchronous Verifiable Secret Sharing and Multiparty Computation with Optimal Resilience

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    Verifiable Secret Sharing (VSS) is a fundamental primitive used as a building block in many distributed cryptographic tasks, such as Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) and Byzantine Agreement (BA). An important variant of VSS is Asynchronous VSS (AVSS) which is designed to work over asynchronous networks. AVSS is a two phase (Sharing, Reconstruction) protocol carried out among n parties in the presence of a computationally unbounded active adversary, who can corrupt up to t parties. We assume that every two parties in the network are directly connected by a pairwise secure channel. In this paper, we present a new statistical AVSS protocol with optimal resilience; i.e. with n = 3t+1. Our protocol privately communicates O((\ell n^3 + n^4 \log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}}) \log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}}) bits and A-casts O(n^3 \log(n)) bits to simultaneously share \ell \geq 1 elements from a finite field F, where \epsilon is the error parameter of our protocol. There are only two known statistical AVSS protocols with n = 3t+1 reported in [CR93] and [PCR09]. The AVSS protocol of [CR93] requires a private communication of O(n^9 (\log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}})^4) bits and A-cast of O(n^9 (\log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}})^2 \log(n)) bits to share a single element from F. Thus our AVSS protocol shows a significant improvement in communication complexity over the AVSS of [CR93]. The AVSS protocol of [PCR09] requires a private communication and A-cast of O((\ell n^3 + n^4) \log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}}) bits to share \ell \geq 1 elements. However, the shared element(s) may be NULL \not \in {\mathbb F}. Thus our AVSS is better than the AVSS of [PCR09] due to the following reasons: 1. The A-cast communication of our AVSS is independent of the number of secrets i.e. \ell; 2. Our AVSS makes sure that the shared value(s) always belong to F. Using our AVSS, we design a new primitive called Asynchronous Complete Secret Sharing (ACSS) which acts as an important building block of asynchronous multiparty computation (AMPC). Using our ACSS scheme, we design a statistical AMPC protocol with optimal resilience; i.e., with n = 3t+1, that privately communicates O(n^5 \log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}}) bits per multiplication gate. This significantly improves the communication complexity of only known optimally resilient statistical AMPC of [BKR93] that privately communicates \Omega(n^{11} (\log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}})^4) bits and A-cast \Omega(n^{11} (\log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}})^2 \log(n)) bits per multiplication gate. Both our ACSS and AVSS employ several new techniques, which are of independent interest

    Privacy-Preserving Ridge Regression on Distributed Data

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    Linear regression is an important statistical tool that models the relationship between some explanatory values and an outcome value using a linear function. In many current applications (e.g. predictive modelling in personalized healthcare), these values represent sensitive data owned by several different parties that are unwilling to share them. In this setting, training a linear regression model becomes challenging and needs specific cryptographic solutions. In this work, we propose a new system that can train a linear regression model with 2-norm regularization (i.e. ridge regression) on a dataset obtained by merging a finite number of private datasets. Our system is composed of two phases: The first one is based on a simple homomorphic encryption scheme and takes care of securely merging the private datasets. The second phase is a new ad-hoc two-party protocol that computes a ridge regression model solving a linear system where all coefficients are encrypted. The efficiency of our system is evaluated both on synthetically generated and real-world datasets

    Active Mapping and Robot Exploration: A Survey

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    Simultaneous localization and mapping responds to the problem of building a map of the environment without any prior information and based on the data obtained from one or more sensors. In most situations, the robot is driven by a human operator, but some systems are capable of navigating autonomously while mapping, which is called native simultaneous localization and mapping. This strategy focuses on actively calculating the trajectories to explore the environment while building a map with a minimum error. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the research work developed in this field is provided, targeting the most relevant contributions in indoor mobile robotics.This research was funded by the ELKARTEK project ELKARBOT KK-2020/00092 of the Basque Government

    Calculs multipartites

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    Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

    Right Research

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    "Educational institutions play an instrumental role in social and political change, and are responsible for the environmental and social ethics of their institutional practices. The essays in this volume critically examine scholarly research practices in the age of the Anthropocene, and ask what accountability educators and researchers have in ‘righting’ their relationship to the environment. The volume further calls attention to the geographical, financial, legal and political barriers that might limit scholarly dialogue by excluding researchers from participating in traditional modes of scholarly conversation. As such, Right Research is a bold invitation to the academic community to rigorous self-reflection on what their research looks like, how it is conducted, and how it might be developed so as to increase accessibility and sustainability, and decrease carbon footprint. The volume follows a three-part structure that bridges conceptual and practical concerns: the first section challenges our assumptions about how sustainability is defined, measured and practiced; the second section showcases artist-researchers whose work engages with the impact of humans on our environment; while the third section investigates how academic spaces can model eco-conscious behaviour. This timely volume responds to an increased demand for environmentally sustainable research, and is outstanding not only in its interdisciplinarity, but its embrace of non-traditional formats, spanning academic articles, creative acts, personal reflections and dialogues. Right Research will be a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in developing and hybridizing their scholarly communication formats in the face of the current climate crisis.

    Right Research

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    "Educational institutions play an instrumental role in social and political change, and are responsible for the environmental and social ethics of their institutional practices. The essays in this volume critically examine scholarly research practices in the age of the Anthropocene, and ask what accountability educators and researchers have in ‘righting’ their relationship to the environment. The volume further calls attention to the geographical, financial, legal and political barriers that might limit scholarly dialogue by excluding researchers from participating in traditional modes of scholarly conversation. As such, Right Research is a bold invitation to the academic community to rigorous self-reflection on what their research looks like, how it is conducted, and how it might be developed so as to increase accessibility and sustainability, and decrease carbon footprint. The volume follows a three-part structure that bridges conceptual and practical concerns: the first section challenges our assumptions about how sustainability is defined, measured and practiced; the second section showcases artist-researchers whose work engages with the impact of humans on our environment; while the third section investigates how academic spaces can model eco-conscious behaviour. This timely volume responds to an increased demand for environmentally sustainable research, and is outstanding not only in its interdisciplinarity, but its embrace of non-traditional formats, spanning academic articles, creative acts, personal reflections and dialogues. Right Research will be a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in developing and hybridizing their scholarly communication formats in the face of the current climate crisis.
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