ALTERNATIVE URBAN REGENERATION POLICIES OF BROWN FIELDS LIKE OLD MILITARY CAMPS FOR THE CITY OF ALEXANDROUPOLIS

It is generally accepted that the lack of free public spaces in Greek cities, is one of the most severe urban planning problems, not only in the central urban areas but also in the peripheral neighbourhoods. Furthermore, it is a fact that through the land use legal framework there have been efforts towards the implementation of a number of planning tools, regulations, thresholds, methods etc in order to obtain and secure an appropriate level of acceptable urban public space mainly for parks, playgrounds and squares, which would ensure at least a minimal level of essential (sustainable) free urban public space. The reality has shown that this effort has not been successful until today. The provision, the quality and the spatial distribution of public space in Greek cities, cannot correspond to the continuously increasing needs and wishes of citizens. This is probably the most serious weakness of the Greek urban planning system, because it cannot achieve the objectives of urban sustainability. In this manner and specifically for some cities, military camps that exist and occupy vital space in the urban tissue, present a new challenge for “liberating†this space and providing new quality to the urban environment. The present paper presents a case study in which, proposals are formulated for the transformation of “brown†space occupied by military camps, to urban free space, useful for the adjacent neighbourhoods, as well as for the city of Alexandroupolis in general. The importance of the proposal also lies in the fact that this transformation will take in account the present rigid and complex legal and institutional framework, having, thus, the elements of a pilot intervention. The basic approach is based on the principle that military camps are public land, and can be used in the formulation of a regeneration policy. Critical elements of the approach are the assessment of benefit that the transformation of this space will bring to the city, the allocation of the benefits to the neighbourhoods, the effectiveness of spatial integration of the new space in the existing urban structure, and the absolute protection of public space in the whole city.

Special Spatial Plans VS Local Spatial Plans. Towards a new vision of planning system at the local level in Greece, during the period of economic crisis

Spatial planning in Greece is organized in three levels, following a strict, top-down hierarchical framework where the two first levels (national-regional) have a purely strategic role and the third one, the municipal, has a regulatory character and the obligation to comply with the upper ones. However, the municipal level is unable to function, as shown by the very low rate of implementation of the Local Spatial Plans (LSPs) to date. In this prospect, the economic crisis in Greece since 2010, has led to the need for a spatial reform whose main aim is to promote economic growth. Thus, a key innovation is the introduction of a new category of plans, the Special Spatial Plans (SSPs) which are at the same hierarchical spatial level as the LSPs, the third one, but on a smaller scale than them and focus on strategic investments.This paper, mainly explores the effort to integrate spatial planning at all levels with the implementation of LSPs. It also states the ability of the more flexible, bottom-up planning approach with the SSPs. In that prospect, it is approved “ad hoc” that the new legislation is not complied with the fundamental principle of "subsidiarity," stating that decisions should be taken at the local level (local governance). Finally, the paper aims to draw reasonable conclusions as to whether the spatial reform will improve the efficiency of spatial planning or simply be just a reaction to the economic crisis that could put the valuable principles of planning at stake

Special Spatial Plans VS Local Spatial Plans. Towards a new vision of planning system at the local level in Greece, during the period of economic crisis

Spatial planning in Greece is organized in three levels, following a strict, top-down hierarchical framework where the two first levels (national-regional) have a purely strategic role and the third one, the municipal, has a regulatory character and the obligation to comply with the upper ones. However, the municipal level is unable to function, as shown by the very low rate of implementation of the Local Spatial Plans (LSPs) to date. In this prospect, the economic crisis in Greece since 2010, has led to the need for a spatial reform whose main aim is to promote economic growth. Thus, a key innovation is the introduction of a new category of plans, the Special Spatial Plans (SSPs) which are at the same hierarchical spatial level as the LSPs, the third one, but on a smaller scale than them and focus on strategic investments.This paper, mainly explores the effort to integrate spatial planning at all levels with the implementation of LSPs. It also states the ability of the more flexible, bottom-up planning approach with the SSPs. In that prospect, it is approved “ad hoc” that the new legislation is not complied with the fundamental principle of "subsidiarity," stating that decisions should be taken at the local level (local governance). Finally, the paper aims to draw reasonable conclusions as to whether the spatial reform will improve the efficiency of spatial planning or simply be just a reaction to the economic crisis that could put the valuable principles of planning at stake

Using Virtualisation to Protect Against Zero-Day Attacks

Bal, H.E. [Promotor]Bos, H.J. [Copromotor

Self-Healing Multitier Architectures Using Cascading Rescue Points

Software bugs and vulnerabilities cause serious problems to both home users and the Internet infrastructure, limiting the availability of Internet services, causing loss of data, and reducing system integrity. Software self-healing using rescue points (RPs) is a known mechanism for recovering from unforeseen errors. However, applying it on multitier architectures can be problematic because certain actions, like transmitting data over the network, cannot be undone. We propose cascading rescue points (CRPs) to address the state inconsistency issues that can arise when using traditional RPs to recover from errors in interconnected applications. With CRPs, when an application executing within a RP transmits data, the remote peer is notified to also perform a checkpoint, so the communicating entities checkpoint in a coordinated, but loosely coupled way. Notifications are also sent when RPs successfully complete execution, and when recovery is initiated, so that the appropriate action is performed by remote parties. We developed a tool that implements CRPs by dynamically instrumenting binaries and transparently injecting notifications in the already established TCP channels between applications. We tested our tool with various applications, including the MySQL and Apache servers, and show that it allows them to successfully recover from errors, while incurring moderate overhead between 4.54% and 71.56%

iLeak: A Lightweight System for Detecting Inadvertent Information Leaks

Data loss incidents, where data of sensitive nature are exposed to the public, have become too frequent and have caused damages of millions of dollars to companies and other organizations. Repeatedly, information leaks occur over the Internet, and half of the time they are accidental, caused by user negligence, misconfiguration of software, or inadequate understanding of an application's functionality. This paper presents iLeak, a lightweight, modular system for detecting inadvertent information leaks. Unlike previous solutions, iLeak builds on components already present in modern computers. In particular, we employ system tracing facilities and data indexing services, and combine them in a novel way to detect data leaks. Our design consists of three components: uaudits are responsible for capturing the information that exits the system, while Inspectors use the indexing service to identify if the transmitted data belong to files that contain potentially sensitive information. The Trail Gateway handles the communication and synchronization of uaudits and Inspectors. We implemented iLeak on Mac OS X using DTrace and the Spotlight indexing service. Finally, we show that iLeak is indeed lightweight, since it only incurs 4% overhead on protected applications

Detecting Traffic Snooping in Anonymity Networks Using Decoys

Anonymous communication networks like Tor partially protect the confidentiality of their users' traffic by encrypting all intra-overlay communication. However, when the relayed traffic reaches the boundaries of the overlay network towards its actual destination, the original user traffic is inevitably exposed. At this point, unless end-to-end encryption is used, sensitive user data can be snooped by a malicious or compromised exit node, or by any other rogue network entity on the path towards the actual destination. We explore the use of decoy traffic for the detection of traffic interception on anonymous proxying systems. Our approach is based on the injection of traffic that exposes bait credentials for decoy services that require user authentication. Our aim is to entice prospective eavesdroppers to access decoy accounts on servers under our control using the intercepted credentials. We have deployed our prototype implementation in the Tor network using decoy IMAP and SMTP servers. During the course of six months, our system detected eight cases of traffic interception that involved eight different Tor exit nodes. We provide a detailed analysis of the detected incidents, discuss potential improvements to our system, and outline how our approach can be extended for the detection of HTTP session hijacking attacks

Exploiting Split Browsers for Efficiently Protecting User Data

Offloading complex tasks to a resource-abundant environment like the cloud, can extend the capabilities of resource constrained mobile devices, extend battery life, and improve user experience. Split browsing is a new paradigm that adopts this strategy to improve web browsing on devices like smartphones and tablets. Split browsers offload computation to the cloud by design; they are composed by two parts, one running on the thin client and one in the cloud. Rendering takes place primarily in the latter, while a bitmap or a simplified web page is communicated to the client. Despite its difference with traditional web browsing, split browsing still suffers from the same types of threats, such as cross-site scripting. In this paper, we propose exploiting the design of split browsers to also utilize cloud resources for protecting against various threats efficiently. We begin by systematically studying split browsing architectures, and then proceed to propose two solutions, in parallel and inline cloning, that exploit the inherent features of this new browsing paradigm to accurately and efficiently protect user data against common web exploits. Our preliminary results suggest that our framework can be efficiently applied to Amazon’s Silk, the most widely deployed at the time of writing, split browser