There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

The objective of this paper is to give a comprehensive introduction to applied cryptography with an engineer or computer scientist in mind. The emphasis is on the knowledge needed to create practical systems which supports integrity, confidentiality, or authenticity. Topics covered includes an introduction to the concepts in cryptography, attacks against cryptographic systems, key use and handling, random bit generation, encryption modes, and message authentication codes. Recommendations on algorithms and further reading is given in the end of the paper. This paper should make the reader able to build, understand and evaluate system descriptions and designs based on the cryptographic components described in the paper.

[서평]「Applied Cryptography」

Usually, a proof of a theorem contains more knowledge than the mere fact that the theorem is true. For instance, to prove that a graph is Hamiltonian it suffices to exhibit a Hamiltonian tour in it; however, this seems to contain more knowledge than the single bit Hamiltonian/non-Hamiltonian.In this paper a computational complexity theory of the “knowledge” contained in a proof is developed. Zero-knowledge proofs are defined as those proofs that convey no additional knowledge other than the correctness of the proposition in question. Examples of zero-knowledge proof systems are given for the languages of quadratic residuosity and 'quadratic nonresiduosity. These are the first examples of zero-knowledge proofs for languages not known to be efficiently recognizable.

/pdf/the-knowledge-complexity-of-interactive-proof-systems-31apre0ecf.pdf

The knowledge complexity of interactive proof-systems

All one needs to know about fog computing and related edge computing paradigms: A complete survey

Presentacio sobre l'Oficina de Proteccio de Dades Personals de la UAB i la politica Open Science. Va formar part de la conferencia "Les politiques d'Open Data / Open Acces: Implicacions a la recerca" orientada a investigadors i gestors de projectes europeus que va tenir lloc el 20 de setembre de 2018 a la Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

/pdf/general-data-protection-regulation-2z11cloyp7.pdf

General data protection regulation

The goal of monitoring contractual service level agreements (SLAs) is to measure the performance of a service, to evaluate whether its provider complies with the level of quality of the service (QoS) that the consumer expects. The aim of this paper is to bring to the system designer's attention the fundamental issues that monitoring of contractual SLAs involves: SLA specification, separation of the computation and communication infrastructure of the provider, service points of presence, metric collection approaches, measurement service and evaluation and violation detection service. The paper develops an architecture and give reasons why currently it is practicable to offer guaranteed QoS only to consumers sharing Internet service providers (ISPs) directly with the service provider.

/pdf/on-the-monitoring-of-contractual-service-level-agreements-cj7fxunjzi.pdf

On the monitoring of contractual service level agreements

Converting a conventional contract into an electronic equivalent that can be executed and enforced by computers is a challenging task. The difficulties are caused by the ambiguities that the original human-oriented text is likely to contain. The conversion process involves the conversion of the original text into mathematical notation. We discuss how standard conventional contracts can be described by means of finite state machines (FSMs). This mathematical description helps eliminate ambiguities from the original text before the contract is coded into a computer program. We describe how to map the rights and obligations extracted from the clauses of the contract into the states, transition and output functions, and input and output symbols of a FSM. The FSM representation can be used to guarantee that the clauses stipulated in the contract are observed when the contract is executed. We describe the middleware required for the enactment of the contract represented as a FSM.

/pdf/contract-representation-for-run-time-monitoring-and-2etbxyreuu.pdf

Contract representation for run-time monitoring and enforcement

https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/file_store/production/69694/894AAD65-3735-46F7-8C90-334CC5D94843.pdf

Run-time monitoring and enforcement of electronic contracts

Recent trends show that deploying low cost devices with lightweight virtualisation services is an attractive alternative for supporting the computational requirements at the network edge. Examples include inherently supporting the computational needs for local applications like smart cities and applications with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements which are naturally hard to satisfy by traditional cloud infrastructures or supporting multi-access edge computing requirements of network in the box type solutions. The implementation of such a platform demands precise knowledge of several key system parameters, including the load that a service can tolerate and the number of service instances that a device can host. In this paper, we introduce PiCasso, a platform for lightweight service orchestration at the edges, and discuss the benchmarking results aimed at identifying the critical parameters that PiCasso needs to take into consideration.

PiCasso: A lightweight edge computing platform

Converting a conventional contract into an electronic equivalent is not trivial. The difficulties are caused by the ambiguities that the original human-oriented text is likely to contain. In order to detect and remove these ambiguities the contract needs to be described in a mathematically precise notation before the description can be subjected to rigorous analysis. This paper identifies and discusses a list of correctness requirements that a typical executable business contract should satisfy. Next the paper shows how relevant parts of standard conventional contracts can be described by means of Finite State Machines (FSMs). Such a description can then be subjected to model checking. The paper demonstrates this using Promela language and the Spin validator.

/pdf/model-checking-correctness-properties-of-electronic-5czejxfdvx.pdf

Carlos Molina-Jimenez

Papers

On the monitoring of contractual service level agreements

Contract representation for run-time monitoring and enforcement

Run-time monitoring and enforcement of electronic contracts

PiCasso: A lightweight edge computing platform

Model Checking Correctness Properties of Electronic Contracts