Here are two books on a topic new to Technometrics: statistical and mathematical demography. The first author of Applied Mathematical Demography wrote the first two editions of this book alone. The second edition was published in 1985. Professor Keyfritz noted in the Preface (p. vii) that at age 90 he had no interest in doing another edition; however, the publisher encouraged him to find a coauthor. The result is an additional focus for the book in the world of biology that makes it much more relevant for the sciences. The book is now part of the publisher’s series on Statistics for Biology and Health. Much of it, of course, focuses on the many aspects of human populations. The new material focuses on mature population models, the particular focus of the new author (see, e.g., Caswell 2000). As one might expect from a book that was originally written in the 1970s, it does not include a lot of information on statistical computing. The new book by Alho and Spencer is focused on putting a better emphasis on statistics in the discipline of demography (Preface, p. vii). It is part of the publisher’s Series in Statistics. The authors are both statisticians, so the focus is on statistics as used for demographic problems. The authors are targeting human applications, so their perspective on science does not extend any further than epidemiology. The book actually strikes a good balance between statistical tools and demographic applications. The authors use the first two chapters to teach statisticians about the concepts of demography. The next four chapters are very similar to the statistics content found in introductory books on survival analysis, such as the recent book by Kleinbaum and Klein (2005), reported by Ziegel (2006). The next three chapters are focused on various aspects of forecasting demographic rates. The book concludes with chapters focusing on three areas of applications: errors in census numbers, financial applications, and small-area estimates.

Univariate Discrete Distributions

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

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General data protection regulation

We present CONIKS, an end-user key verification service capable of integration in end-to-end encrypted communication systems. CONIKS builds on transparency log proposals for web server certificates but solves several new challenges specific to key verification for end users. CONIKS obviates the need for global third-party monitors and enables users to efficiently monitor their own key bindings for consistency, downloading less than 20 kB per day to do so even for a provider with billions of users. CONIKS users and providers can collectively audit providers for non-equivocation, and this requires downloading a constant 2.5 kB per provider per day. Additionally, CONIKS preserves the level of privacy offered by today's major communication services, hiding the list of usernames present and even allowing providers to conceal the total number of users in the system.

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CONIKS: bringing key transparency to end users

The secret keys of critical network authorities -- such as time, name, certificate, and software update services -- represent high-value targets for hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses. Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities, enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative statements in under two seconds.

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Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning

Blockchain technology is believed by many to be a game changer in many application domains. While the first generation of blockchain technology (i.e., Blockchain 1.0) is almost exclusively used for cryptocurrency, the second generation (i.e., Blockchain 2.0), as represented by Ethereum, is an open and decentralized platform enabling a new paradigm of computing—Decentralized Applications (DApps) running on top of blockchains. The rich applications and semantics of DApps inevitably introduce many security vulnerabilities, which have no counterparts in pure cryptocurrency systems like Bitcoin. Since Ethereum is a new, yet complex, system, it is imperative to have a systematic and comprehensive understanding on its security from a holistic perspective, which was previously unavailable in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, the present survey, which can also be used as a tutorial, fills this void. We systematize three aspects of Ethereum systems security: vulnerabilities, attacks, and defenses. We draw insights into vulnerability root causes, attack consequences, and defense capabilities, which shed light on future research directions.

A Survey on Ethereum Systems Security: Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Defenses

We present ARPKI, a public-key infrastructure that ensures that certificate-related operations, such as certificate issuance, update, revocation, and validation, are transparent and accountable. ARPKI is the first such infrastructure that systematically takes into account requirements identified by previous research. Moreover, ARPKI is co-designed with a formal model, and we verify its core security property using the Tamarin prover. We present a proof-of-concept implementation providing all features required for deployment. ARPKI efficiently handles the certification process with low overhead and without incurring additional latency to TLS. ARPKI offers extremely strong security guarantees, where compromising n-1 trusted signing and verifying entities is insufficient to launch an impersonation attack. Moreover, it deters misbehavior as all its operations are publicly visible.

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ARPKI: Attack Resilient Public-Key Infrastructure

The recently proposed concept of publicly verifiable logs is a promising approach for mitigating security issues and threats of the current Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI). Although much progress has been made towards a more secure infrastructure, the currently proposed approaches still suffer from security vulnerabilities, inefficiency, or incremental deployment challenges. In this paper we propose PoliCert, a comprehensive log-based and domain-oriented architecture that enhances the security of PKI by offering: a) stronger authentication of a domain's public keys, b) comprehensive and clean mechanisms for certificate management, and c) an incentivised incremental deployment plan. Surprisingly, our approach has proved fruitful in addressing other seemingly unrelated problems such as TLS-related error handling and client/server misconfiguration.

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PoliCert: Secure and Flexible TLS Certificate Management

The emergence of cloud infrastructure has significantly reduced the costs of hardware and software resources in computing infrastructure. To ensure security, the data is usually encrypted before it's outsourced to the cloud. Unlike searching and sharing the plain data, it is challenging to search and share the data after encryption. Nevertheless, it is a critical task for the cloud service provider as the users expect the cloud to conduct a quick search and return the result without losing data confidentiality. To overcome these problems, we propose a ciphertext-policy attribute-based mechanism with keyword search and data sharing (CPAB-KSDS) for encrypted cloud data. The proposed solution not only supports attribute-based keyword search but also enables attribute-based data sharing at the same time, which is in contrast to the existing solutions that only support either one of two features. Additionally, the keyword in our scheme can be updated during the sharing phase without interacting with the PKG. In this article, we describe the notion of CPAB-KSDS as well as its security model. Besides, we propose a concrete scheme and prove that it is against chosen ciphertext attack and chosen keyword attack secure in the random oracle model. Finally, the proposed construction is demonstrated practical and efficient in the performance and property comparison.

Secure Keyword Search and Data Sharing Mechanism for Cloud Computing

The level of trust accorded to certification authorities has been decreasing over the last few years as several cases of misbehavior and compromise have been observed. Log-based approaches, such as Certificate Transparency, ensure that fraudulent TLS certificates become publicly visible. However, a key element that log-based approaches still lack is a way for clients to verify that the log behaves in a consistent and honest manner. This task is challenging due to privacy, efficiency, and deployability reasons. In this paper, we propose the first (to the best of our knowledge) gossip protocols that enable the detection of log inconsistencies. We analyze these protocols and present the results of a simulation based on real Internet traffic traces. We also give a deployment plan, discuss technical issues, and present an implementation.

Efficient Gossip Protocols for Verifying the Consistency of Certificate Logs

This book describes the essential components of the SCION secure Internet architecture, the first architecture designed foremost for strong security and high availability. Among its core features, SCION also provides route control, explicit trust information, multipath communication, scalable quality-of-service guarantees, and efficient forwarding. The book includes functional specifications of the network elements, communication protocols among these elements, data structures, and configuration files. In particular, the book offers a specification of a working prototype. The authors provide a comprehensive description of the main design features for achieving a secure Internet architecture. They facilitate the reader throughout, structuring the book so that the technical detail gradually increases, and supporting the text with a glossary, an index, a list of abbreviations, answers to frequently asked questions, and special highlighting for examples and for sections that explain important research, engineering, and deployment features. The book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students who are interested in network security.

Pawel Szalachowski

Papers

ARPKI: Attack Resilient Public-Key Infrastructure

PoliCert: Secure and Flexible TLS Certificate Management

Secure Keyword Search and Data Sharing Mechanism for Cloud Computing

Efficient Gossip Protocols for Verifying the Consistency of Certificate Logs

SCION: A Secure Internet Architecture