Smart cards: State-of-the-art to future directions

The evolution of smart card technology provides an interesting case study of the relationship and interactions between security and business requirements. This paper maps out the milestones for smart card technology, discussing at each step the opportunities and challenges. The paper reviews recently proposed innovative ownership/management models and the security challenges associated with them. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible future directions for the technology, and the challenges these present

Discrete Public Goods with Incomplete Information

We investigate a simultaneous discrete public good provision game with incomplete information. To use the terminology of Admati and Perry (1991), we consider both contribution and subscription games. In the former, contributions are not refunded if the project is not completed, while in the latter they are. In the presence of complete information about individuals' valuations for the public good, the difference between the equilibrium outcomes of a subscription game and a contribution game is not significant. However, there is both casual evidence from the fund-raising literature and experimental evidence that subscription games are ``superior '', i.e., a refund increases the chance of providing the good given that it is efficient to do so. Our analysis shows that this is indeed the case in the presence of incomplete information. We compute a symmetric equilibrium for the subscription game and show that it is not necessarily efficient. This inefficiency stems from the difficulties arising in coordinating to overcome the free-rider problem in the presence of incomplete information. Although it is well known that informational disparities impose limits on the efficiency of outcomes, the novel feature of our analysis is to explicitly model the resulting trade-off --- when deciding how much to contribute towards the public good --- between increasing the likelihood of provision and creating incentives for free-riding by the other player. Moreover, we show that for the contribution game, ``contributing zero'' is the only equilibrium for a given range of the fixed cost of provision and for a family of distributions.public goods; incomplete information; continuous distribution

Equilibrium Selection and the Rate of Convergence in Coordination Games with Simultaneous Play

We apply the dynamic stochastic framework proposed in the recent evolutionary literature to a class of coordination games played simultaneously by the entire population. In these games, payoffs whence best replies are determined by a summary statistic of the population strategy profile. We demonstrate that with simultaneous play, the equilibrium selection depends crucially on how best responses to the summary statistic remain piece-wise constant. In fact, all the strict Nash equilibria in the underlying stage game can be declared stochastically stable depending on how the best response mapping generates piece-wise constant best responses. Furthermore, we show that if the best response mapping is sufficiently asymmetric, the expected waiting time until the unique stochastically stable state is reached is of the same order as the mutation rate, even in the limit as the population size grows to infinity.equilibrium selection; stochastic stability; waiting time; rate of convergence

Compound serum and hemin free medium for cultivation of Leishmania tarentolae: A recombinant protein expression system

Serum free cultivation of Leishmania is cost-effective and improves large scale production of well defined parasite material. Moreover, the production of recombinant pharmaceutical proteins requires cultivation of the host in a culture medium free of animal materials, so several culture media for Leishmania tarentolae expression system have been introduced. Some investigations have established the development of a serum-free, but hemin containing medium, based on yeast extract and buffer salts. Hemin is a substance of animal origin also interferes with nickel ions on Ni-NTA resin. In this study, L. tarentolae from Iranian lizard, cultivated in a compound serum and hemin free medium (LBR medium) and the growth parameters were determined. Here we report that LBR medium could obtain high maximal cell density of 1.8 × 108 cells ml-1 equivalent to that of hemin containing medium in our conditions. This compound medium was confirmed by successful expression of a 28 kDa his-tagged protein. With knowledge of the results, the easy-preparing culture medium could be used as a new culture medium for the production of recombinant proteins in L. tarentolae.Keywords: Leishmania tarentolae, serum free cultivation of Leishmania, protein expression, Leishmania culture media

Digital Trust - Trusted Computing and Beyond A Position Paper

Along with the invention of computers and interconnected networks, physical societal notions like security, trust, and privacy entered the digital environment. The concept of digital environments begins with the trust (established in the real world) in the organisation/individual that manages the digital resources. This concept evolved to deal with the rapid growth of the Internet, where it became impractical for entities to have prior offline (real world) trust. The evolution of digital trust took diverse approaches and now trust is defined and understood differently across heterogeneous domains. This paper looks at digital trust from the point of view of security and examines how valid trust approaches from other domains are now making their way into secure computing. The paper also revisits and analyses the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) along with associated technologies and their relevance in the changing landscape. We especially focus on the domains of cloud computing, mobile computing and cyber-physical systems. In addition, the paper also explores our proposals that are competing with and extending the traditional functionality of TPM specifications

Unified Model for Data Security -- A Position Paper

One of the most crucial components of modern Information Technology (IT) systems is data. It can be argued that the majority of IT systems are built to collect, store, modify, communicate and use data, enabling different data stakeholders to access and use it to achieve different business objectives. The confidentiality, integrity, availability, audit ability, privacy, and quality of the data is of paramount concern for end-users ranging from ordinary consumers to multi-national companies. Over the course of time, different frameworks have been proposed and deployed to provide data security. Many of these previous paradigms were specific to particular domains such as military or media content providers, while in other cases they were generic to different verticals within an industry. There is a much needed push for a holistic approach to data security instead of the current bespoke approaches. The age of the Internet has witnessed an increased ease of sharing data with or without authorisation. These scenarios have created new challenges for traditional data security. In this paper, we study the evolution of data security from the perspective of past proposed frameworks, and present a novel Unified Model for Data Security (UMDS). The discussed UMDS reduces the friction from several cross-domain challenges, and has the functionality to possibly provide comprehensive data security to data owners and privileged users