Interoperable geographically distributed astronomical infrastructures: technical solutions

The increase of astronomical data produced by a new generation of observational tools poses the need to distribute data and to bring computation close to the data. Trying to answer this need, we set up a federated data and computing infrastructure involving an international cloud facility, EGI federated, and a set of services implementing IVOA standards and recommendations for authentication, data sharing and resource access. In this paper we describe technical problems faced, specifically we show the designing, technological and architectural solutions adopted. We depict our technological overall solution to bring data close to computation resources. Besides the adopted solutions, we propose some points for an open discussion on authentication and authorization mechanisms.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP

Internal report cluster 1: Urban freight innovations and solutions for sustainable deliveries (2/4)

Technical report about sustainable urban freight solutions, part 2 of

Internal report cluster 1: Urban freight innovations and solutions for sustainable deliveries (3/4)

Technical report about sustainable urban freight solutions, part 3 of

DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS AIMED AT IMPROVING TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITIES, DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS AND INCREASING THE SERVICE LIFE OF BRIQUETTE PRESSES

Development of technical solutions for manufacturing and further use advanced roller press having advanced technological capabilities and increased resource exploitation

The Einstein-Vlasov system

Rigorous results on solutions of the Einstein-Vlasov system are surveyed. After an introduction to this system of equations and the reasons for studying it, a general discussion of various classes of solutions is given. The emphasis is on presenting important conceptual ideas, while avoiding entering into technical details. Topics covered include spatially homogenous models, static solutions, spherically symmetric collapse and isotropic singularities.Comment: Lecture notes from Cargese worksho

ZETA - Zero-Trust Authentication: Relying on Innate Human Ability, not Technology

Reliable authentication requires the devices and channels involved in the process to be trustworthy; otherwise authentication secrets can easily be compromised. Given the unceasing efforts of attackers worldwide such trustworthiness is increasingly not a given. A variety of technical solutions, such as utilising multiple devices/channels and verification protocols, has the potential to mitigate the threat of untrusted communications to a certain extent. Yet such technical solutions make two assumptions: (1) users have access to multiple devices and (2) attackers will not resort to hacking the human, using social engineering techniques. In this paper, we propose and explore the potential of using human-based computation instead of solely technical solutions to mitigate the threat of untrusted devices and channels. ZeTA (Zero Trust Authentication on untrusted channels) has the potential to allow people to authenticate despite compromised channels or communications and easily observed usage. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We propose the ZeTA protocol with a formal definition and security analysis that utilises semantics and human-based computation to ameliorate the problem of untrusted devices and channels. (2) We outline a security analysis to assess the envisaged performance of the proposed authentication protocol. (3) We report on a usability study that explores the viability of relying on human computation in this context