Quire: Lightweight Provenance for Smart Phone Operating Systems

Smartphone apps often run with full privileges to access the network and sensitive local resources, making it difficult for remote systems to have any trust in the provenance of network connections they receive. Even within the phone, different apps with different privileges can communicate with one another, allowing one app to trick another into improperly exercising its privileges (a Confused Deputy attack). In Quire, we engineered two new security mechanisms into Android to address these issues. First, we track the call chain of IPCs, allowing an app the choice of operating with the diminished privileges of its callers or to act explicitly on its own behalf. Second, a lightweight signature scheme allows any app to create a signed statement that can be verified anywhere inside the phone. Both of these mechanisms are reflected in network RPCs, allowing remote systems visibility into the state of the phone when an RPC is made. We demonstrate the usefulness of Quire with two example applications. We built an advertising service, running distinctly from the app which wants to display ads, which can validate clicks passed to it from its host. We also built a payment service, allowing an app to issue a request which the payment service validates with the user. An app cannot not forge a payment request by directly connecting to the remote server, nor can the local payment service tamper with the request

Whose Click Fraud Data Do You Trust? Effect Of Click Fraud On Advertiser’s Trust And Sponsored Search Advertising Decisions

Online sponsored search has emerged as a dominant business model for majority of search engines and as a popular advertising mechanism for online retailers. However, sponsored search advertising is being negatively impacted by click fraud which involves the intentional clicking on sponsored links with the purpose of gaining undue monetary returns for the search engine or harming a particular advertiser by depleting its advertising budget. While search engines tend to compensate advertisers to an extent for click frauds, it still leaves an element of uncertainty in the minds of advertisers whether search engine is being faithful in reporting the click fraud numbers. Armed with additional data available from third party click fraud audit companies, advertisers may have more reasons to suspect click fraud numbers reported by search engines if there is a discrepancy between the numbers reported by two sources (search engines and third party click fraud audit companies). While the phenomenon of click fraud has been acknowledged to exist, its effect on sponsored search advertisers’ trust and their decision to advertise with a particular search engine has not been given sufficient attention in the literature. As an initial step, in this research in progress study, we develop a theoretical model to examine the effect of click fraud on advertiser’s trust in search engine and its subsequent impact on advertiser’s decision to adjust advertising spend for different search engines. In this paper, we also outline the proposed experimental design to validate the theoretical model subsequently in future. Broadly, the research suggests that sponsored search advertisers are likely to adjust their advertising spend based on level of trust they have in search engine, click fraud numbers discrepancy, and return on investment obtained from advertising on that particular search engine

Purchasing Guide for Tennessee Municipalities

This guide is designed to clear up questions about purchasing and to save cities money

Purchasing Guide for Tennessee Municipalities (2008)

This guide is designed to answer questions about purchasing and to save cities money. Includes sample forms and ordinances

Procedures manual for the procurement of goods and services: January 2017

Este Manual establece las normas y procedimientos que permiten cumplir las políticas contenidas en los reglamentos aprobados por los órganos superiores del IICA, Reglamento de la Dirección General y en el Reglamento Financiero, para la ejecución de la gestión administrativa de los procesos de adquisición de bienes y contratación de servicios en la Sede Central y en las Representaciones del IICA en los Estados Miembros.The present Manual establishes rules and procedures relating to the management of the procurement process for goods and services at Headquarters and at the IICA Delegations in the Member States, thus facilitating compliance with policies approved by the governing bodies of IICA, the Rules of Procedure of the General Directorate and the Financial Rules

Practical Reason: the Commercial Speech Paradigm

First Amendment jurisprudence incorporates a continual struggle to balance coflicting interests. Free speech values must be weighed against communitarian interests in a rational manner. The article examines the foundationalist approach to this task, and finds it incapable of providing a unified First Amendment theory. Through examination of the treatment of commercial speech, the article arrives at a more coherent approach through the application of practical reasoning. The proposed methodology allows for principled analysis and decisions which yield an internally consistent body of law

Enhancing System Transparency, Trust, and Privacy with Internet Measurement

While on the Internet, users participate in many systems designed to protect their information’s security. Protection of the user’s information can depend on several technical properties, including transparency, trust, and privacy. Preserving these properties is challenging due to the scale and distributed nature of the Internet; no single actor has control over these features. Instead, the systems are designed to provide them, even in the face of attackers. However, it is possible to utilize Internet measurement to better defend transparency, trust, and privacy. Internet measurement allows observation of many behaviors of distributed, Internet-connected systems. These new observations can be used to better defend the system they measure. In this dissertation, I explore four contexts in which Internet measurement can be used to the aid of end-users in Internet-centric, adversarial settings. First, I improve transparency into Internet censorship practices by developing new Internet measurement techniques. Then, I use Internet measurement to enable the deployment of end-to-middle censorship circumvention techniques to a half-million users. Next, I evaluate transparency and improve trust in the Web public-key infrastructure by combining Internet measurement techniques and using them to augment core components of the Web public-key infrastructure. Finally, I evaluate browser extensions that provide privacy to users on the web, providing insight for designers and simple recommendations for end-users. By focusing on end-user concerns in widely deployed systems critical to end-user security and privacy, Internet measurement enables improvements to transparency, trust, and privacy.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163199/1/benvds_1.pd

Leonardville: cultural expression in a rural Central Texas volunteer fire department

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-168).Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.This ethnography of a volunteer fire department (VFD) in Leonardville, Texas documents the maintenance and reproduction of community in rural Texas. Through stenographic analysis I illustrate how the VFD becomes a setting where the social world of Leonardville is created and where the people of Leonardville become shareholders in their community. This project builds upon the growing interest in the ethnography of North America, the anthropological analysis of work and what is often called ''worklore'' or the folklore of the work place. To understand the VFD and its place in both Leonardville and the state, I develop the concept of the ''conventions of work place'' or the job-specific actions and communicative practices that define the VFD as a social entity and establish a sense of membership, camaraderie and trust among its participants. Also, I use ''conventions of mutual obligation'' to talk about the responsibilities and commitments volunteers have to each other and their community. Finally, the VFD is examined in the context of its ''social fields'' (community, service area, county, and state) to understand the links that exist between Leonardville, the VFD and state programs/regulations as well as private organizations and businesses