An approach to produce a stack of photo definable polyimide based flat UTCPs

Getting output of multiple chips within the volume of a single chip is the driving force behind development of this novel 3D integration technology which has a broad range of industrial and medical electronic applications. This can be achieved by laminating multiple layers of spin-on polyimide based ultrathin chip packages (UTCPs) with fine pitch through hole interconnects

InShopnito: an advanced yet privacy-friendly mobile shopping application

Mobile Shopping Applications (MSAs) are rapidly gaining popularity. They enhance the shopping experience, by offering customized recommendations or incorporating customer loyalty programs. Although MSAs are quite effective at attracting new customers and binding existing ones to a retailer's services, existing MSAs have several shortcomings. The data collection practices involved in MSAs and the lack of transparency thereof are important concerns for many customers. This paper presents inShopnito, a privacy-preserving mobile shopping application. All transactions made in inShopnito are unlinkable and anonymous. However, the system still offers the expected features from a modern MSA. Customers can take part in loyalty programs and earn or spend loyalty points and electronic vouchers. Furthermore, the MSA can suggest personalized recommendations even though the retailer cannot construct rich customer profiles. These profiles are managed on the smartphone and can be partially disclosed in order to get better, customized recommendations. Finally, we present an implementation called inShopnito, of which the security and performance is analyzed. In doing so, we show that it is possible to have a privacy-preserving MSA without having to sacrifice practicality

Urban coral reefs: Degradation and resilience of hard coral assemblages in coastal cities of East and Southeast Asia

© 2018 The Author(s) Given predicted increases in urbanization in tropical and subtropical regions, understanding the processes shaping urban coral reefs may be essential for anticipating future conservation challenges. We used a case study approach to identify unifying patterns of urban coral reefs and clarify the effects of urbanization on hard coral assemblages. Data were compiled from 11 cities throughout East and Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Singapore, Jakarta, Hong Kong, and Naha (Okinawa). Our review highlights several key characteristics of urban coral reefs, including “reef compression” (a decline in bathymetric range with increasing turbidity and decreasing water clarity over time and relative to shore), dominance by domed coral growth forms and low reef complexity, variable city-specific inshore-offshore gradients, early declines in coral cover with recent fluctuating periods of acute impacts and rapid recovery, and colonization of urban infrastructure by hard corals. We present hypotheses for urban reef community dynamics and discuss potential of ecological engineering for corals in urban areas

Anonymous Credentials in Practice: Realizing Anonymous Applications and Services

Security and privacy are requirements that keep gaining importance in today's information-driven world. Every system or application connected to the Internet has to be sufficiently secured. However, information leaks and security breaches are commonplace, even though many can be prevented by the proper use of proven security and privacy technologies. This PhD focuses on facilitating the development of secure and privacy-preserving applications. To do so, we propose an application development technique together with a framework implementation that separates the concerns between the application developer, the security expert, the service provider and the user. Priman is a security and privacy-enhancing application development framework that enables developers to integrate security and privacy enhancing technologies in their applications. The technologies offered by the framework mainly focus on access control, data storage protection and transport layer protection. In order to facilitate developers in creating secure applications, Priman separates the concerns of developers with security experts, service providers and users as well as offering a uniform, high-level API. Priman recognizes that developers are not necessarily security experts, and hence, it allows developers to build their applications without needing to know a.) which security technology is used in the application and b.) how to configure these security technologies. The abstractions made by Priman shift the technology-specific configuration details from the application code to configuration policies. In essence, this means that application code written with the Priman framework is independent from the technology used underneath. Developers can use the abstract, high- level building blocks offered by Priman to build complex protocols and applications, while these building blocks are configured in configuration policies by a security expert. Furthermore, service providers and users can change application behavior by specifying authentication and privacy preferences. Furthermore, this PhD applies the Priman development strategy and framework to three existing applications or services that have strict security requirements. In addition, we analyze the application's privacy properties by performing a Privacy by Design analysis. Finally, we show our conclusions and lessons learned from applying Priman in practical scenarios and hands-on sessions with industry partners.nrpages: 162status: publishe

IoTSEAR: A System for Enforcing Access Control Rules with the IoT

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PriMan: Facilitating the Development of Secure and Privacy-Preserving Applications

Part 10: Organizational SecurityInternational audienceSecurity and privacy are essential in today’s information-driven society. However, security technologies and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are often difficult to integrate in applications due to their inherent complexity and steep learning curve. In this paper, we present a flexible, technology agnostic development framework that facilitates the integration of security and privacy-preserving technologies into applications. Technology-specific configuration details are shifted from the application code to configuration policies. These policies are configured by domain experts independently from the application’s source code. We developed a prototype in Java, called PriMan, which runs on both desktops and Android based devices. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that PriMan introduces a low and acceptable overhead (e.g., less than one millisecond per operation). In addition, we compare PriMan with other, freely available solutions. PriMan facilitates the integration of PETs and security technologies in current and future applications

An anonymous, verifiable Internet service POLL system

While there is a great number of electronic voting protocols proposed in the literature, only a handful of them are actually deployed. Still, these few available schemes require voters to completely trust the poll provider with the anonymity of their votes and/or the integrity of the results. More robust schemes with better privacy and integrity guarantees do exist, however, they are complex to deploy and, therefore, are not suitable for small to medium scale voting scenarios (e.g. electing the board of directors of an international society). In this paper, we present avisPoll, a practical electronic voting scheme that provides flexible anonymity as well as universal poll integrity validation. For this purpose, avisPoll relies on an anonymous credential system and other cryptographic building blocks. The system can be offered as a cloud service which can give everybody the possibility to organize a poll and define the eligible voter set. Hence, the complexity of setting up a poll is significantly reduced without reducing privacy and integrity guarantees. Finally, we show a prototype implementation of avisPoll and give detailed performance results. These results demonstrate that the system is indeed practical for use, even on commodity hardware. For instance, it takes ≈ 150 milliseconds for a client to cast a vote, and ≈ 25 seconds for server to thoroughly verify 1000 votes.nrpages: 10status: publishe

An efficient and unlinkable incentives scheme

A popular way to encourage user actions or contributions in a service are the widely adopted incentives schemes. They represent schemes in which users are offered certain benefits or reputation in return for their actions. However, these systems rely on service providers to manage users' profiles, which record all the activity of the users, the benefits they are entitled to and/or reputation. The service provider thus holds a vast amount of user's private information, even when the user is only known by a pseudonym. In order to address this issue, we present a privacy-preserving incentives scheme that allows earning and redeeming incentives in an unlinkable way. Furthermore, the incentives do not have to be linked to a specific action for which they were issued or to the identity or pseudonym of the user who has earned them. Still, it is possible for the users to prove ownership of the incentives and the service provider is able to verify their validity. The described approach is also efficient and the provided experimental evaluation demonstrates that it is suitable for usage on a mobile device, such as a smartphone.nrpages: 15status: publishe

An advanced, privacy-friendly loyalty system

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014. Loyalty systems are a very popular service employed by retailers in order to measure and reward customer loyalty. However, currently deployed systems introduce many privacy risks, as the users’ data is completely controlled by retailers. In this work we tackle this issue by investigating the requirements posed on a privacy-friendly loyalty system and proposing a new design for a digital loyalty system. With this novel approach, the users are given more control over their data, but retailers are still able to measure their loyalty and perform (authorised) data collection. Additionally, the functionality of the design is flexible and allows for deployment of more advanced services.status: publishe