The Impact of e-Democracy in Political Stability of Nigeria

The history of the Nigerian electoral process has been hitherto characterized by violence stemming from disputes in election outcomes. For instance, violence erupted across some states in Northern Nigeria when results indicated that a candidate who was popular in that part of the country was losing the election leading to avoidable loss of lives. Beside, this dispute in election outcome lingers for a long time in litigation at the electoral tribunals which distracts effective governance. However, the increasing penetrating use of ICTs in Nigeria is evident in the electoral processes with consequent shift in the behavior of actors in the democratic processes, thus changing the ways Nigerians react to election outcomes. This paper examines the trend in the use ICT in the Nigerian political system and its impact on the stability of the polity. It assesses the role of ICT in recent electoral processes and compares its impact on the outcome of the process in lieu of previous experiences in the Nigeria. Furthermore, the paper also examines the challenges and risks of implementing e-Democracy in Nigeria and its relationship to the economy in the light of the socio-economic situation of the country. The paper adopted qualitative approach in data gathering and analysis. From the findings, the paper observed that e-democracy is largely dependent on the level of ICT adoption, which is still at its lowest ebb in the country. It recognizes the challenges in the provision of ICT infrastructure and argues that appropriate low-cost infrastructure applicable to the Nigerian condition can be made available to implement e-democracy and thus arouse the interest of the populace in governance, increase the number of voters, and enhance transparency, probity and accountability, and participation in governance as well as help stabilize the nascent democrac

E-Governance: Strategy for Mitigating Non-Inclusion of Citizens in Policy Making in Nigeria

The Nigerian federation that currently has 36 states structure adopted the Weberian Public Administrative system before now as an ideal way of running government, which was characterized with the traditional way of doing things without recourse to the deployment of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Today e-governance is seen as a paradigm shift from the previous way of governance. Research has shown that, the adoption and implementation of e-governance is more likely to bring about effective service delivery, mitigate corruption and ultimately enhance citizens’ participation in governmental affairs. However, it has been argued that infrastructure such as regular electricity power and access to the Internet, in addition to a society with high rate of literacy level are required to effectively implement and realize the potentials of e-governance for improved delivery of services. Due to the difficulties currently experienced, developing nations need to adequately prepare for the implementation of e-governance on the platform of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Hence, this study seeks to examine whether the adoption and implementation of e-governance in the context of Nigeria would mitigate the hitherto non-inclusion of citizens in the formulation and implementation of government policies aimed at enhanced development. To achieve the objective of the study, data were sourced and analyzed majorly by examining government websites of 20 states in the Nigerian federation to ascertain if there are venues for citizens to interact with government in the area of policy making and feedback on government actions, as a way of promoting participatory governance. The study revealed that the adoption and implementation of e-governance in the country is yet to fully take place. This is due to lack of infrastructure, low level of literacy rate and government inability to provide the necessary infrastructure for e-governance to materialize. The paper therefore, recommends among others the need for the Federal Government to involve a sound and clear policy on how to go about the adoption and implementation of egovernance through deliberate effort at increasing budgetary allocation towards infrastructural development and mass education of citizens

User-Controlled Computations in Untrusted Computing Environments

Computing infrastructures are challenging and expensive to maintain. This led to the growth of cloud computing with users renting computing resources from centralized cloud providers. There is also a recent promise in providing decentralized computing resources from many participating users across the world. The compute on your own server model hence is no longer prominent. But, traditional computer architectures, which were designed to give a complete power to the owner of the computing infrastructure, continue to be used in deploying these new paradigms. This forces users to completely trust the infrastructure provider on all their data. The cryptography and security community research two different ways to tackle this problem. The first line of research involves developing powerful cryptographic constructs with formal security guarantees. The primitive of functional encryption (FE) formalizes the solutions where the clients do not interact with the sever during the computation. FE enables a user to provide computation-specific secret keys which the server can use to perform the user specified computations (and only those) on her encrypted data. The second line of research involves designing new hardware architectures which remove the infrastructure owner from the trust base. The solutions here tend to have better performance but their security guarantees are not well understood. This thesis provides contributions along both lines of research. In particular, 1) We develop a (single-key) functional encryption construction where the size of secret keys do not grow with the size of descriptions of the computations, while also providing a tighter security reduction to the underlying computational assumption. This construction supports the computation class of branching programs. Previous works for this computation class achieved either short keys or tighter security reductions but not both. 2) We formally model the primitive of trusted hardware inspired by Intel's Software Guard eXtensions (SGX). We then construct an FE scheme in a strong security model using this trusted hardware primitive. We implement this construction in our system Iron and evaluate its performance. Previously, the constructions in this model relied on heavy cryptographic tools and were not practical. 3) We design an encrypted database system StealthDB that provides complete SQL support. StealthDB is built on top of Intel SGX and designed with the usability and security limitations of SGX in mind. The StealthDB implementation on top of Postgres achieves practical performance (30% overhead over plaintext evaluation) with strong leakage profile against adversaries who get snapshot access to the memory of the system. It achieves a more gradual degradation in security against persistent adversaries than the prior designs that aimed at practical performance and complete SQL support. We finally survey the research on providing security against quantum adversaries to the building blocks of SGX

Modellierung ortsabhängiger Zugriffskontrolle für mobile Geschäftsprozesse

Der Einsatz mobiler Computer wie Smartphones für die Abarbeitung mobiler Geschäftsprozesse bringt neben großen Vorteilen auch spezifische Sicherheitsherausforderungen mit sich. Als ein Lösungsansatz hierfür wird "ortsabhängige Zugriffskontrolle" verfolgt. Die Grundidee dabei ist es, den aktuellen Aufenthaltsort des Nutzers für die Zugriffskontrollentscheidung auszuwerten. Zur Modellierung solcher Ortseinschränkungen wird eine auf UML-Aktivitätsdiagrammen aufbauende Notation eingeführt

La Salle University Undergraduate Catalog 2004-2005

https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/course_catalogs/1179/thumbnail.jp

Memorias del Congreso Argentino en Ciencias de la Computación - CACIC 2021

Trabajos presentados en el XXVII Congreso Argentino de Ciencias de la Computación (CACIC), celebrado en la ciudad de Salta los días 4 al 8 de octubre de 2021, organizado por la Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI) y la Universidad Nacional de Salta (UNSA).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic