Interoperability, Trust Based Information Sharing Protocol and Security: Digital Government Key Issues

Improved interoperability between public and private organizations is of key significance to make digital government newest triumphant. Digital Government interoperability, information sharing protocol and security are measured the key issue for achieving a refined stage of digital government. Flawless interoperability is essential to share the information between diverse and merely dispersed organisations in several network environments by using computer based tools. Digital government must ensure security for its information systems, including computers and networks for providing better service to the citizens. Governments around the world are increasingly revolving to information sharing and integration for solving problems in programs and policy areas. Evils of global worry such as syndrome discovery and manage, terror campaign, immigration and border control, prohibited drug trafficking, and more demand information sharing, harmonization and cooperation amid government agencies within a country and across national borders. A number of daunting challenges survive to the progress of an efficient information sharing protocol. A secure and trusted information-sharing protocol is required to enable users to interact and share information easily and perfectly across many diverse networks and databases globally.Comment: 20 page

Model Based Mission Assurance: NASA's Assurance Future

Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is seeing increased application in planning and design of NASAs missions. This suggests the question: what will be the corresponding practice of Model Based Mission Assurance (MBMA)? Contemporaneously, NASAs Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) is evaluating a new objectives based approach to standards to ensure that the Safety and Mission Assurance disciplines and programs are addressing the challenges of NASAs changing missions, acquisition and engineering practices, and technology. MBSE is a prominent example of a changing engineering practice. We use NASAs objectives-based strategy for Reliability and Maintainability as a means to examine how MBSE will affect assurance. We surveyed MBSE literature to look specifically for these affects, and find a variety of them discussed (some are anticipated, some are reported from applications to date). Predominantly these apply to the early stages of design, although there are also extrapolations of how MBSE practices will have benefits for testing phases. As the effort to develop MBMA continues, it will need to clearly and unambiguously establish the roles of uncertainty and risk in the system model. This will enable a variety of uncertainty-based analyses to be performed much more rapidly than ever before and has the promise to increase the integration of CRM (Continuous Risk Management) and PRA (Probabilistic Risk Analyses) even more fully into the project development life cycle. Various views and viewpoints will be required for assurance disciplines, and an over-arching viewpoint will then be able to more completely characterize the state of the project/program as well as (possibly) enabling the safety case approach for overall risk awareness and communication

Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

Shuttle Ground Operations Efficiencies/Technologies (SGOE/T) study. Volume 2: Ground Operations evaluation

The Ground Operations Evaluation describes the breath and depth of the various study elements selected as a result of an operational analysis conducted during the early part of the study. Analysis techniques used for the evaluation are described in detail. Elements selected for further evaluation are identified; the results of the analysis documented; and a follow-on course of action recommended. The background and rationale for developing recommendations for the current Shuttle or for future programs is presented

The Value of User-Visible Internet Cryptography

Cryptographic mechanisms are used in a wide range of applications, including email clients, web browsers, document and asset management systems, where typical users are not cryptography experts. A number of empirical studies have demonstrated that explicit, user-visible cryptographic mechanisms are not widely used by non-expert users, and as a result arguments have been made that cryptographic mechanisms need to be better hidden or embedded in end-user processes and tools. Other mechanisms, such as HTTPS, have cryptography built-in and only become visible to the user when a dialogue appears due to a (potential) problem. This paper surveys deployed and potential technologies in use, examines the social and legal context of broad classes of users, and from there, assesses the value and issues for those users

Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management

Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS), submitted 19th March 200

Security Testing: A Survey

Identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring security functionality by security testing is a widely applied measure to evaluate and improve the security of software. Due to the openness of modern software-based systems, applying appropriate security testing techniques is of growing importance and essential to perform effective and efficient security testing. Therefore, an overview of actual security testing techniques is of high value both for researchers to evaluate and refine the techniques and for practitioners to apply and disseminate them. This chapter fulfills this need and provides an overview of recent security testing techniques. For this purpose, it first summarize the required background of testing and security engineering. Then, basics and recent developments of security testing techniques applied during the secure software development lifecycle, i.e., model-based security testing, code-based testing and static analysis, penetration testing and dynamic analysis, as well as security regression testing are discussed. Finally, the security testing techniques are illustrated by adopting them for an example three-tiered web-based business application

Computational Ontologies and Information Systems II: Formal Specification

This paper extends the study of ontologies in Part I of this study (Volume 14, Article 8) in the context of Information Systems. The basic foundations of computational ontologies presented in Part I are extended to formal specifications in this paper. This paper provides a review of the formalisms, languages, and tools for specifying and implementing computational ontologies Directions for future research are also provided