Security protocols suite for machine-to-machine systems

Nowadays, the great diffusion of advanced devices, such as smart-phones, has shown that there is a growing trend to rely on new technologies to generate and/or support progress; the society is clearly ready to trust on next-generation communication systems to face today’s concerns on economic and social fields. The reason for this sociological change is represented by the fact that the technologies have been open to all users, even if the latter do not necessarily have a specific knowledge in this field, and therefore the introduction of new user-friendly applications has now appeared as a business opportunity and a key factor to increase the general cohesion among all citizens. Within the actors of this technological evolution, wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are becoming of great importance. These wireless networks are made up of interconnected low-power devices that are able to provide a great variety of services with little or even no user intervention. Examples of these services can be fleet management, fire detection, utilities consumption (water and energy distribution, etc.) or patients monitoring. However, since any arising technology goes together with its security threats, which have to be faced, further studies are necessary to secure wireless M2M technology. In this context, main threats are those related to attacks to the services availability and to the privacy of both the subscribers’ and the services providers’ data. Taking into account the often limited resources of the M2M devices at the hardware level, ensuring the availability and privacy requirements in the range of M2M applications while minimizing the waste of valuable resources is even more challenging. Based on the above facts, this Ph. D. thesis is aimed at providing efficient security solutions for wireless M2M networks that effectively reduce energy consumption of the network while not affecting the overall security services of the system. With this goal, we first propose a coherent taxonomy of M2M network that allows us to identify which security topics deserve special attention and which entities or specific services are particularly threatened. Second, we define an efficient, secure-data aggregation scheme that is able to increase the network lifetime by optimizing the energy consumption of the devices. Third, we propose a novel physical authenticator or frame checker that minimizes the communication costs in wireless channels and that successfully faces exhaustion attacks. Fourth, we study specific aspects of typical key management schemes to provide a novel protocol which ensures the distribution of secret keys for all the cryptographic methods used in this system. Fifth, we describe the collaboration with the WAVE2M community in order to define a proper frame format actually able to support the necessary security services, including the ones that we have already proposed; WAVE2M was funded to promote the global use of an emerging wireless communication technology for ultra-low and long-range services. And finally sixth, we provide with an accurate analysis of privacy solutions that actually fit M2M-networks services’ requirements. All the analyses along this thesis are corroborated by simulations that confirm significant improvements in terms of efficiency while supporting the necessary security requirements for M2M networks

Peacemakers: How to End an African Civil War Without Firing a Gun

Featured Speaker: Andrea Bartoli, Director of the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason Universityhttps://egrove.olemiss.edu/croft_spe/1002/thumbnail.jp

DIPL 3851/CORE 3851 Religion, Law, War

This course will expose participants to fundamental understanding of religion, law and war focusing on the nexus of the three. It will do so in a highly participatory manner. The course will focus on the three terms separately and in relation to each other. As both CORE and Diplomacy course, students from different background will be encouraged to learn from one another and be aware of their own learning. The course will encourage a critical subjective response from participants. It will invite an analysis of three original documents: the Vatican II document ‘Nostra Aetate’; the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights; and the UNESCO document on peace as well as actual cases of interest

DIPL 3851/CORE 3851 Religion, Law, War

This course will expose participants to fundamental understanding of religion, law and war focusing on the nexus of the three. It will do so in a highly participatory manner. The course will focus on the three terms separately and in relation to each other. As both CORE and Diplomacy course, students from different background will be encouraged to learn from one another and be aware of their own learning. The course will encourage a critical subjective response from participants. It will invite an analysis of three original documents: the Vatican II document \u27Nostra Aetate\u27; the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights; and the UNESCO document on peace as well as actual cases of interest

DIPL 3852/CORE 3852 Catholic Peacemaking

The Catholic Peacemaking course offers an introduction to the understanding and practice of Catholic peacemaking as experienced through the centuries. Students will integrate the knowledge of four areas of exploration: 1- Catholic contributions to a contemporary understanding of peace 2- The appreciation of the changing context in which this understanding has evolved, especially through the encounter with relevant Catholic Peacemakers 3- The identification of peace as a relevant contemporary challenge that must be confronted by each Catholic and by the Church as a whole 4- Consistent with a contemporary Catholic understanding of peace, the elaboration of responses by the students, on one side, to the yearning for peace of poor and oppressed peoples, and on the other, to perceived threats to peace Each student will present on an historical case

DIPL 6120 Catholic Peacemaking

The Catholic Peacemaking course offers an introduction to the understanding and practice of Catholic peacemaking as experienced through the centuries. Students will integrate the knowledge of four areas of exploration: 1- Catholic contributions to a contemporary understanding of peace 2- The appreciation of the changing context in which this understanding has evolved, especially through the encounter with relevant Catholic Peacemakers 3- The identification of peace as a relevant contemporary challenge that must be confronted by each Catholic and by the Church as a whole 4- Consistent with a contemporary Catholic understanding of peace, the elaboration of responses by the students, on one side, to the yearning for peace of poor and oppressed peoples, and on the other, to perceived threats to peace Each student will present on an historical case with a focus on magisterium pacis

Export quality upgrading under credit constraints

This paper studies whether credit constraints affect the decision of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) to upgrade the quality of their exported output with respect to the one sold domestically. We use a detailed firm-level data-set on Italian SMEs reporting information on output characteristics, credit rationing and international activities. Employing .rm credit scores used by banks for their lending decisions, we assess how credit constraints affect export quality upgrading. First, we find that exporting firms are less likely to upgrade output quality, when their credit score worsens. A one standard deviation worsening in the credit score lowers the probability of quality upgrading by more than 35 percent. Second, firms exporting to distant markets cut quality upgrading more sharply when their score worsens. The negative impact of credit constraints is confirmed when taking into account firm heterogeneity in size and other relevant .rm attributes. The main result is robust to endogeneity considerations of the credit score. Overall, our findings suggest that, by impacting export quality upgrading, credit constraints may affect the intensive margin of trade