Using Rights to Counter “Gender-Specific” Wrongs

One popular strategy of opposition to practices of female genital cutting (FCG) is rooted in the global feminist movement. Arguing that women’s rights are human rights, global feminists contend that practices of FGC are a culturally specific manifestation of gender-based oppression that violates a number of rights. Many African feminists resist a women’s rights approach. They argue that by focusing on gender as the primary axis of oppression affecting the African communities where FGC occurs, a women’s rights approach has misrepresented African women as passive victims who need to be rescued from African men and has obscured the role of certain international institutions that have perpetuated the oppression of African women. In this paper, I defend these critiques by arguing that the use of a women’s rights framework to combat practices of female genital cutting among African communities has often been practically ineffective and morally inappropriate

An integrated decision support environment for organisational decision making

Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a stand-alone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organisational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organisation (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed environment. Such systems are designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenge. This paper proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organisational decision making. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a combination of tight and loose integration approaches for information exchange and communication. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates a good balance between flexibility and reliability

Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain

With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the flow of that data across various stakeholders.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Published in: 4th International Workshop on Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2017) in conjunction with 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2017) December 14, 2017, Boston, MA, US

The Anatomy and Facets of Dynamic Policies

Information flow policies are often dynamic; the security concerns of a program will typically change during execution to reflect security-relevant events. A key challenge is how to best specify, and give proper meaning to, such dynamic policies. A large number of approaches exist that tackle that challenge, each yielding some important, but unconnected, insight. In this work we synthesise existing knowledge on dynamic policies, with an aim to establish a common terminology, best practices, and frameworks for reasoning about them. We introduce the concept of facets to illuminate subtleties in the semantics of policies, and closely examine the anatomy of policies and the expressiveness of policy specification mechanisms. We further explore the relation between dynamic policies and the concept of declassification.Comment: Technical Report of publication under the same name in Computer Security Foundations (CSF) 201

Secure Cloud-Edge Deployments, with Trust

Assessing the security level of IoT applications to be deployed to heterogeneous Cloud-Edge infrastructures operated by different providers is a non-trivial task. In this article, we present a methodology that permits to express security requirements for IoT applications, as well as infrastructure security capabilities, in a simple and declarative manner, and to automatically obtain an explainable assessment of the security level of the possible application deployments. The methodology also considers the impact of trust relations among different stakeholders using or managing Cloud-Edge infrastructures. A lifelike example is used to showcase the prototyped implementation of the methodology

Privacy, security, and trust issues in smart environments

Recent advances in networking, handheld computing and sensor technologies have driven forward research towards the realisation of Mark Weiser's dream of calm and ubiquitous computing (variously called pervasive computing, ambient computing, active spaces, the disappearing computer or context-aware computing). In turn, this has led to the emergence of smart environments as one significant facet of research in this domain. A smart environment, or space, is a region of the real world that is extensively equipped with sensors, actuators and computing components [1]. In effect the smart space becomes a part of a larger information system: with all actions within the space potentially affecting the underlying computer applications, which may themselves affect the space through the actuators. Such smart environments have tremendous potential within many application areas to improve the utility of a space. Consider the potential offered by a smart environment that prolongs the time an elderly or infirm person can live an independent life or the potential offered by a smart environment that supports vicarious learning

The Audit Logic: Policy Compliance in Distributed Systems

We present a distributed framework where agents can share data along with usage policies. We use an expressive policy language including conditions, obligations and delegation. Our framework also supports the possibility to refine policies. Policies are not enforced a-priori. Instead policy compliance is checked using an a-posteriri auditing approach. Policy compliance is shown by a (logical) proof that the authority can systematically check for validity. Tools for automatically checking and generating proofs are also part of the framework.\u