KeyForge: Mitigating Email Breaches with Forward-Forgeable Signatures

Email breaches are commonplace, and they expose a wealth of personal, business, and political data that may have devastating consequences. The current email system allows any attacker who gains access to your email to prove the authenticity of the stolen messages to third parties -- a property arising from a necessary anti-spam / anti-spoofing protocol called DKIM. This exacerbates the problem of email breaches by greatly increasing the potential for attackers to damage the users' reputation, blackmail them, or sell the stolen information to third parties. In this paper, we introduce "non-attributable email", which guarantees that a wide class of adversaries are unable to convince any third party of the authenticity of stolen emails. We formally define non-attributability, and present two practical system proposals -- KeyForge and TimeForge -- that provably achieve non-attributability while maintaining the important protection against spam and spoofing that is currently provided by DKIM. Moreover, we implement KeyForge and demonstrate that that scheme is practical, achieving competitive verification and signing speed while also requiring 42% less bandwidth per email than RSA2048

A road map for interoperable language resource metadata

LRs remain expensive to create and thus rare relative to demand across languages and technology types. The accidental re-creation of an LR that already exists is a nearly unforgiveable waste of scarce resources that is unfortunately not so easy to avoid. The number of catalogs the HLT researcher must search, with their different formats, make it possible to overlook an existing resource. This paper sketches the sources of this problem and outlines a proposal to rectify along with a new vision of LR cataloging that will to facilitates the documentation and exploitation of a much wider range of LRs than previously considered

HUDDL for description and archive of hydrographic binary data

Many of the attempts to introduce a universal hydrographic binary data format have failed or have been only partially successful. In essence, this is because such formats either have to simplify the data to such an extent that they only support the lowest common subset of all the formats covered, or they attempt to be a superset of all formats and quickly become cumbersome. Neither choice works well in practice. This paper presents a different approach: a standardized description of (past, present, and future) data formats using the Hydrographic Universal Data Description Language (HUDDL), a descriptive language implemented using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). That is, XML is used to provide a structural and physical description of a data format, rather than the content of a particular file. Done correctly, this opens the possibility of automatically generating both multi-language data parsers and documentation for format specification based on their HUDDL descriptions, as well as providing easy version control of them. This solution also provides a powerful approach for archiving a structural description of data along with the data, so that binary data will be easy to access in the future. Intending to provide a relatively low-effort solution to index the wide range of existing formats, we suggest the creation of a catalogue of format descriptions, each of them capturing the logical and physical specifications for a given data format (with its subsequent upgrades). A C/C++ parser code generator is used as an example prototype of one of the possible advantages of the adoption of such a hydrographic data format catalogue

Analysis and Synthesis of Metadata Goals for Scientific Data

The proliferation of discipline-specific metadata schemes contributes to artificial barriers that can impede interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The authors considered this problem by examining the domains, objectives, and architectures of nine metadata schemes used to document scientific data in the physical, life, and social sciences. They used a mixed-methods content analysis and Greenberg’s (2005) metadata objectives, principles, domains, and architectural layout (MODAL) framework, and derived 22 metadata-related goals from textual content describing each metadata scheme. Relationships are identified between the domains (e.g., scientific discipline and type of data) and the categories of scheme objectives. For each strong correlation (\u3e0.6), a Fisher’s exact test for nonparametric data was used to determine significance (p \u3c .05). Significant relationships were found between the domains and objectives of the schemes. Schemes describing observational data are more likely to have “scheme harmonization” (compatibility and interoperability with related schemes) as an objective; schemes with the objective “abstraction” (a conceptual model exists separate from the technical implementation) also have the objective “sufficiency” (the scheme defines a minimal amount of information to meet the needs of the community); and schemes with the objective “data publication” do not have the objective “element refinement.” The analysis indicates that many metadata-driven goals expressed by communities are independent of scientific discipline or the type of data, although they are constrained by historical community practices and workflows as well as the technological environment at the time of scheme creation. The analysis reveals 11 fundamental metadata goals for metadata documenting scientific data in support of sharing research data across disciplines and domains. The authors report these results and highlight the need for more metadata-related research, particularly in the context of recent funding agency policy changes

Web-course search engine : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

The World Wide Web is an amazing place that people's lives more and more rely on. Especially, for the young generation, they spend a significant amount of their play and study time using the Internet. Many tools have been developed to help the educational users in finding educational resources. These tools include various search engines. Web directories and educational domain gateways. Nevertheless, these systems have many weaknesses that made them unsuitable for the specific search needs of the learners. The research presented in this thesis describes the development of the Web-course search engine, which is a friendly, efficient and accurate helper for the learners to get what they want in the vast Internet ocean. The most attractive feature of this system is that the system uses one universal language, which lets the searchers and the resources "communicate" with each other. Then the learner searchers can find the Web-based educational resources that are most fit to their needs and course providers can provide all necessary information about their courseware. This universal language is one widely acceptable Metadata standard. Following the Metadata standard, the system collects exact information about educational resources, provides adequate search parameters for search and returns evaluative results. By using the Web-course search engine, the learners and the other educational users are able to find useful, valuable and related educational resources more effectively and efficiently. Some improvement suggestions of the search mechanism in the World Wide Web have been brought forward for the future research as a result of this project

Huddl: the Hydrographic Universal Data Description Language

Since many of the attempts to introduce a universal hydrographic data format have failed or have been only partially successful, a different approach is proposed. Our solution is the Hydrographic Universal Data Description Language (HUDDL), a descriptive XML-based language that permits the creation of a standardized description of (past, present, and future) data formats, and allows for applications like HUDDLER, a compiler that automatically creates drivers for data access and manipulation. HUDDL also represents a powerful solution for archiving data along with their structural description, as well as for cataloguing existing format specifications and their version control. HUDDL is intended to be an open, community-led initiative to simplify the issues involved in hydrographic data access

PANGAEA information system for glaciological data management

Specific parameters determined on cores from continental ice sheets or glaciers can be used to reconstruct former climate. To use this scientific resource effectively an information system is needed which guarantees consistent longtime storage of data and provides easy access for the scientific community.An information system to archive any data of paleoclimatic relevance, together with the related metadata, raw data and evaluated paleoclimatic data, is presented. The system, based on a relational database, provides standardized import and export routines, easy access with uniform retrieval functions, and tools for the visualization of the data. The network is designed as a client/server system providing access through the Internet with proprietary client software including a high functionality or read-only access on published data via the World Wide Web

Libraries and Information Systems Need XML/RDF... but Do They Know It?

This article presents an approach to the uses of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and Semantic Web technologies in the field of information services, focusing mainly on the creation and management of digital libraries compared to traditional libraries, while paying special attention to the concept and application of metadata, and RDF based integration