On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet

Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed workflow environment

RSA Security Home> RSA Laboratories> Tech Notes> TWIRL and RSA Key Size

The popular 1024-bit key size for RSA keys is becoming the next horizon for researchers in inte factorization, as demonstrated by the innovative “TWIRL ” design recently proposed by Adi Sham Tromer. The design confirms that the traditional assumption that a 1024-bit RSA key provides co strength to an 80-bit symmetric key has been a reasonable one. Thus, if the 80-bit security level appropriate for a given application, then TWIRL itself has no immediate effect. Many details rem worked out, however, and the cost estimates are inconclusive. TWIRL provides an opportunity f key sizes in practice; RSA Laboratories ’ revised recommendations are given in Table 1 below

An Analysis of Shamir’s Factoring Device

for an unusual piece of hardware. This hardware, called “TWINKLE ” (which stands for The Weizmann INstitute Key Locating Engine), is an electro-optical sieving device which will execute sieve-based factoring algorithms approximately two to three orders of magnitude as fast as a conventional fast PC. The announcement only presented a rough design, and there a number of practical difficulties involved with fabricating the device. It runs at a very high clock rate (10 GHz), must trigger LEDs at precise intervals of time, and uses wafer-scale technology. However, it is my opinion that the device is practical and could be built after some engineering effort is applied to it. Shamir estimates that the device can be fabricated (after the desig