Re- appraising the right of foreign nationals under the Nigerian Land Use Act

This paper examines the right of foreigners to own land under the Nigerian Land Use Act with a view to determining the state of the law on this subject matter. The Land Use Act did not make any express provision prohibiting foreigners from accessing land in Nigeria for industrial, commercial or residential purposes. However, the Act conferred the power to make regulation in this regard on the National Council of States. Unfortunately, the National Council of States has not yet exercised this power thereby leaving a lacuna on the position of the law in this regard. The Nigerian Supreme Court has laid down a precedent to the effect that foreigners cannot own land in Nigeria. The paper found that a closer examination of the state of statutory authorities would reveal that there is no blanket prohibition on the right of foreign nationals to own land in Nigeria The paper further found that the Land Tenure Law of Northern Nigeria merely made the right of access to land by “non-natives” subject to the approval of the Minister. The term “non-natives” as used under the Land Tenure Law of Northern Nigeria extended to people whose parents are not members of any tribe indigenous to Northern Nigeria. The acquisition of Land by Aliens Law of Lagos State and other States actually came close to a blanket prohibition. The paper also discovered that the provisions of the Land Use Act as it affects the right of foreigners to own land in Nigeria is imprecise. The paper attempted to resolve the inherent conflict between the aforementioned sub national laws and the Land Use Act which is an Act of the National Assembly entrenched in the Constitution. Recommendations were also made on how the law on this subject matter can be improved Key Words: “Land”, “Ownership”, “Foreign Nationals”, “Constitution”, “Non-Natives”, “Aliens

Re-examining the legality of regional security outfits in Nigeria

Rising insecurity has become a challenge to the government and people of Nigeria. The magnitude of this problem has exceeded the coping capacity of the conventional security outfit in Nigeria. Although Nigeria is a federal state, the central government has always found the idea of a decentralized policing and security activities scary. This is not unconnected with the post-civil war mentality of ensuring the absence of coercive instrument of State do not get into the hands of people with centrifugal tendencies. However, insurgency and other forms of criminality has rendered these fears unwise at this time. The paper examines the constitutional and legal provisions for security of lives and property in Nigeria. The paper found that contrary to the widely held belief that policing and security is the exclusive preserve of the Federal Government, there are provisions within the Constitution and other laws that could enable regional security outfits to operate lawfully in Nigeria. Their effective operation however requires a measure of cooperation with the central government in view of the fact that arms and ammunition which constitutes the major weapon used in security operations is within the exclusive legislative list. The paper also found that the fact this cooperation is required does not make the establishment of security outfit by the States unlawful. In view of the enabling laws, the devolution of powers for the establishment of regional security outfit is inherent within the constitution. Key Words: “Security”, “Law”, “National Development”, “Constitution

Stigmergic interoperability for autonomic systems: Managing complex interactions in multi-manager scenarios

The success of autonomic computing has led to its popular use in many application domains, leading to scenarios where multiple autonomic managers (AMs) coexist, but without adequate support for interoperability. This is evident, for example, in the increasing number of large datacentres with multiple managers which are independently designed. The increase in scale and size coupled with heterogeneity of services and platforms means that more AMs could be integrated to manage the arising complexity. This has led to the need for interoperability between AMs. Interoperability deals with how to manage multi-manager scenarios, to govern complex coexistence of managers and to arbitrate when conflicts arise. This paper presents an architecture-based stigmergic interoperability solution. The solution presented in this paper is based on the Trustworthy Autonomic Architecture (TAArch) and uses stigmergy (the means of indirect communication via the operating environment) to achieve indirect coordination among coexisting agents. Usually, in stigmergy-based coordination, agents may be aware of the existence of other agents. In the approach presented here in, agents (autonomic managers) do not need to be aware of the existence of others. Their design assumes that they are operating in 'isolation' and they simply respond to changes in the environment. Experimental results with a datacentre multi-manager scenario are used to analyse the proposed approach

Trustworthy autonomic architecture (TAArch): Implementation and empirical investigation

This paper presents a new architecture for trustworthy autonomic systems. This trustworthy autonomic architecture is different from the traditional autonomic computing architecture and includes mechanisms and instrumentation to explicitly support run-time self-validation and trustworthiness. The state of practice does not lend itself robustly enough to support trustworthiness and system dependability. For example, despite validating system's decisions within a logical boundary set for the system, there’s the possibility of overall erratic behaviour or inconsistency in the system emerging for example, at a different logical level or on a different time scale. So a more thorough and holistic approach, with a higher level of check, is required to convincingly address the dependability and trustworthy concerns. Validation alone does not always guarantee trustworthiness as each individual decision could be correct (validated) but overall system may not be consistent and thus not dependable. A robust approach requires that validation and trustworthiness are designed in and integral at the architectural level, and not treated as add-ons as they cannot be reliably retro-fitted to systems. This paper analyses the current state of practice in autonomic architecture, presents a different architectural approach for trustworthy autonomic systems, and uses a datacentre scenario as the basis for empirical analysis of behaviour and performance. Results show that the proposed trustworthy autonomic architecture has significant performance improvement over existing architectures and can be relied upon to operate (or manage) almost all level of datacentre scale and complexity

Dead-zone logic in autonomic systems

Published in Evolving and adaptive intelligent systems. IEEE Conference 2014. (EAIS 2014)Dead-Zone logic is a mechanism to prevent autonomic managers from unnecessary, inefficient and ineffective control brevity when the system is sufficiently close to its target state. It provides a natural and powerful framework for achieving dependable self-management in autonomic systems by enabling autonomic managers to smartly carry out a change (or adapt) only when it is safe and efficient to do so-within a particular (defined) safety margin. This paper explores and evaluates the performance impact of dead-zone logic in trustworthy autonomic computing. Using two case example scenarios, we present empirical analyses that demonstrate the effectiveness of dead-zone logic in achieving stability, dependability and trustworthiness in adaptive systems. Dynamic temperature target tracking and autonomic datacentre resource request and allocation management scenarios are used. Results show that dead-zone logic can significantly enhance the trustability of autonomic systems

Emergent issues in African philosophy : a dialogue with Kwasi Wiredu

Abstract: These are major excerpts from an interview that was conducted with Professor Wiredu at Rhodes University during the 13th Annual Conference of The International Society for African Philosophy and Studies. He speaks on a wide range of issues such as political and personal identity, racism and tribalism, moral foundations, ity, the golden rule, the liberal‐communitarian debate, African communalism, human rights, personhood, consensus, meta‐philosophy, amongst other critical themes

Talos: a prototype Intrusion Detection and Prevention system for profiling ransomware behaviour

Abstract: In this paper, we profile the behaviour and functionality of multiple recent variants of WannaCry and CrySiS/Dharma, through static and dynamic malware analysis. We then analyse and detail the commonly occurring behavioural features of ransomware. These features are utilised to develop a prototype Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS) named Talos, which comprises of several detection mechanisms/components. Benchmarking is later performed to test and validate the performance of the proposed Talos IDPS system and the results discussed in detail. It is established that the Talos system can successfully detect all ransomware variants tested, in an average of 1.7 seconds and instigate remedial action in a timely manner following first detection. The paper concludes with a summarisation of our main findings and discussion of potential future works which may be carried out to allow the effective detection and prevention of ransomware on systems and networks

Watchdog Monitoring for Detecting and Handling of Control Flow Hijack on RISC-V-based Binaries

Abstract—Control flow hijacking has been a major challenge in software security. Several means of protections have been developed but insecurities persist. This is because existing protections have sometimes been circumvented while some resilient protections do not cover all applications. Studies have revealed that a holistic way of tackling software insecurity could involve watchdog monitoring and detection via Control Flow Integrity (CFI). The CFI concept has shown a good measure of reliability to mitigate control flow hijacking. However, sophisticated attack techniques in the form of Return Oriented Programming (ROP) have persisted. A flexible protection is desirable, which not only covers as many architecture structures as possible but also mitigates known resilient attacks like ROP. The solution proffered here is a hybrid of CFI and watchdog timing via inter-process signaling (IP-CFI). It is a software-based protection that involves recompilation of the target program. The implementation here is on vulnerable RISC-V-based process but is flexible and could be adapted on other architectures. We present a proof of concept in IP-CFI which when applied to a vulnerable program, ROP is mitigated. The target program incurs a run-time overhead of 1.5%. The code is available

Policing the Cyber Threat: Exploring the threat from Cyber Crime and the ability of local Law Enforcement to respond

The landscape in which UK policing operates today is a dynamic one, and growing threats such as the proliferation of cyber crime are increasing the demand on police resources. The response to cyber crime by national and regional law enforcement agencies has been robust, with significant investment in mitigating against, and tackling cyber threats. However, at a local level, police forces have to deal with an unknown demand, whilst trying to come to terms with new crime types, terminology and criminal techniques which are far from traditional. This paper looks to identify the demand from cyber crime in one police force in the United Kingdom, and whether there is consistency in the recording of crime. As well as this, it looks to understand whether the force can deal with cyber crime from the point of view of the Police Officers and Police Staff in the organisation

Matters of Biocybersecurity with Consideration to Propaganda Outlets and Biological Agents

The modern era holds vast modalities in human data utilization. Within Biocybersecurity (BCS), categories of biological information, especially medical information transmitted online, can be viewed as pathways to destabilize organizations. Therefore, analysis of how the public, along with medical providers, process such data, and the methods by which false information, particularly propaganda, can be used to upset the flow of verified information to populations of medical professionals, is important for maintenance of public health. Herein, we discuss some interplay of BCS within the scope of propaganda and considerations for navigating the field