Ownership proofs of digital works allow to justify the copyright claim to the buyers without revealing any secret information and prevent the owner from deceiving without the assumption of the trusted individual. This paper proposes an ownership proofs scheme for digital works based on proactive verifiable secret sharing and secure multiparty computation. In the proposed scheme, verifiable secret sharing ensures the correctness of ownership secrets and achieves security against cheating participants. Proactive security provides an automatic recovery feature to maintain the integrity and security of secret throughout the lifetime of the scheme. Furthermore, the ownership verification is implemented by using secure multiparty computation and zero-knowledge proofs with homomorphic commitments. Without the assumption of the existence of a trusted individual, the proposed scheme can provide effective computation and discover the dishonesty if not too many individuals collude.
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Zero-knowledge proofs are interactive proof systems in which the prover convinces the verifier that an assertion is true with the unusual property that the verifier learns nothing else than the fact that the assertion is true. In this thesis we consider the notion of efficient provers in two different settings.
In the first setting, we consider efficient honest provers. We prove that every problem in NP that has a zero-knowledge proof also has a zero-knowledge proof where the prover can be implemented in probabilistic polynomial time given an NP witness. Moreover, if the original proof system is statistical zero knowledge, so is the resulting efficient-prover proof system. An equivalence of zero knowledge and efficient-prover zero knowledge was previously known only under the assumption that one-way functions exist [11] (whereas our result is unconditional), and no such equivalence was known for statistical zero knowledge. Our results allow us to translate the many general results and characterizations known for zero knowledge with inefficient provers to zero knowledge with efficient provers.
In the second setting, we consider efficient cheating provers. We show that every language in NP has a statistical zero-knowledge argument system under the complexity assumption that regular one-way functions exist. In such protocols, even a computationally unbounded verifier cannot learn anything other than the fact that the assertion being proven is true, whereas a polynomial-time prover cannot convince the verifier to accept a false assertion except with small probability. This partially answers the question posed by Naor, Ostrovsky, Venkatesan, and Yung [23] of building statistical zero-knowledge arguments on complexity assumptions that are as weak and general as possible.
There exist some drawbacks such as quite deep binary tree and the linkability within various nodes from the same ancestor in the divisible electronic cash (e-cash) scheme based on quadratic residuosity problem. Based on signa- tures of zero-knowledge proof and strong RSA problem, the concept of group signature was firstly introduced to off-line divisible e-cash thereafter, a new off-line divisible e-cash payment system was presented. In the new system, the ancestor node could be divided into more than 2 nodes, and above all, different nodes stem from the same e-cash was unlikable.
This paper focuses on issues and concepts involved in the road administration organization, management, and financing. Road Administration organization is analyzed using a cost function which supported a decentralized fractal organization for a road agency. Road management systems are then discussed. It is argued that for the management systems to be useful must be compatible with the agency organization. Finally, the Road Fund and road user charges are discussed and their importance to road administration management elaborated.
BURN ALL THE RECORDS of realm. (1) commentators of Part Two of Henry VI have acknowledged that one of main features attributed by Shakespeare to Cade's rebellion as it is staged in play is violent hatred for any form, any presence, any use of written word. The reformation of realm desired by Kentish people and their captain, which is characterized by Holinshed's Chronicle as the punishing and reforming of misdemaenors of [the King and Queen's] bad counselors, that neither fifteens [a property tax] should hereafter be demanded nor once any impositions or taxes be spoken of, (2) is radically reinterpreted in history play printed in 1594, very likely performed in 1590 or 1591, and then reedited in 1600 and 1619 Quartos before its publication in Folio. The return to liberty promised by Shakespeare's Cade supposes much more than abolition of any new taxes. It requires abolition of private appropriation of land, disappearance of a monetary economy, suppression of signs which exposed inequalities of status: All realm shall be in common.... There shall be no money, all shall eat and drink on my scores, and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord. Let's kill all lawyers is another of slogans of rebels, uttered by Dick butcher and taken up by Cade: Nay, that I mean to do. such hatred against lawyers? Because they handle two instruments that impose an unjust oppression: parchment and wax. In denouncing tyrannical power of writing Cade distorts and gives a Christian resonance to an old juridical formula: Is not this a lamentable thing, that of skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? (Or in slightly different text of Quarto: Why is it not a miserable thing, that of skin of an innocent Lambe parchment should be made, and then with a little blotting over with inke, a man should undo himselfe.) Cade's mistrust of authority assigned to words inscribed on skin of a dead animal does not have, as many of other formulas or mottos he uses, its origins in familiar tropes of popular protest. The image was in fact introduced in mid-thirteenth century by Sinibaldo dei Fieschi, future Pope Innocent IV, in his Apparatus or commentary to Gregory IX's Decretales: Contra fuit inventum a jure civili, ut credatur pelli animali mortui--against jus gentium civil law has decided that we must believe in skin of a dead animal. Such a gloss gave a striking formulation of an idea already expressed one century earlier against Roman civil law and according to which viva vox, live voice, has to be considered as a evidence more decisive than any written text. In Justinian's Novellae such a preference was indeed mentioned, but it was limited to situations in which authenticity of a property transaction was at stake. In such a case oral testimonies of those who had attended and eye-witnessed juridical act must always be preferred to evidence given by written document itself. (3) But from twelfth century on, privilege granted to viva vox was widely extended and used for establishing superiority of oral testimonies given by witnesses whose juridical and social condition could guarantee their capacity to speak truth. A French juridical saying likewise affirmed that temoins passent lettres--witnesses are superior to written records. It is such an that Edmund uses for convincing Gloucester of Edgar's unfaithfulness: If your honor judge it meet, I will place you where you shall hear us confer of this, and by auricular assurance have your satisfaction. The proof of Edgar's betrayal will be more evident for Gloucester listening to words of his son than reading letter he has supposedly sent to Edmund. âŠ
R. v. Oakes is widely regarded as one of the most important judgments interpreting Canadaâs Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In addition to laying down its famous proportionality test to assess the reasonableness of limits on Charter rights, it clarified the Supreme Court of Canadaâs Courtâs interpretive methodology for Charter cases, perhaps most centrally that rights are of presumptive importance, and limitations the exception that are only acceptable if governments meet a demanding test of justification. The citation of Oakes by courts in Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Fiji, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Namibia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Vanuatu and Zimbabwe has made Oakes one of the central models for rights-based constitutional adjudication. So the almost immediate retreat from Oakes is of broader constitutional significance, both domestically and abroad. There is a dominant narrative on what the true legacy of Oakes and the retreat from Oakes are. The argument is that Oakes set out a uniform approach for assessing justifiable limitations on Charter rights irrespective of differences in context, but that in the decade following Oakes, the Court searched for criteria of deference, to reliably and predictably categorize cases where deference was warranted and those where it was not. These categories were not applied consistently by the Court, and, indeed, produced disagreement within the Court over how they should be applied in specific cases. Underlying both trends were concerns regarding the cogency of the distinctions employed by the Court to delineate the boundaries of these categories. Although the dominant narrative captures much of Oakesâ legacy, it misses much of what is at stake in many recent s. 1 cases, and by implication, what the true legacy of Oakes and the retreat from Oakes are. Oakes created an enormous institutional dilemma for the Court, by setting up a conflict between the demand for definitive proof to support each stage of proportionality analysis, and the reality of policy making under conditions of factual uncertainty. The legacy of Oakes is that the central question of s. 1 is how the Court should allocate the risk of factual uncertainty when governments legislate under conditions of imperfect information. If Oakes is a comparative model for proportionality analysis under other rights-protecting constitutions, then these kinds of problems are not particular to Canada. Foreign courts would be wise to grapple with these difficulties with the benefit of two decades of reflection by Canadian courts instead of simply applying the Oakestest in its original and undeveloped form.
Preface E.Friedman Introduction R.MacFarquhar Two Paths to Modernity B.Gilley ECONOMIC REFORMS Differential Development: Beyond Regime Dichotomies J.Mukherji Chasing China: Can India Bridge the Gap? S.Awamy India's Reform Strengths J.Manor & G.Segal SUB-NATIONAL FACTORS The Persistence of Informal Finance K.Tsai The Political Basis of Decentralization A.Sinha Indigenous vs. Foreign Business Models H.Yasheng & T.Khanna NEW PERSPECTIVES Why Democracy Matters E.Friedman China Rethinks India H.Jinxin Development and Choice A.Saich Conclusion B.Gilley
Unbalanced distribution of regional openness is a factor causing regional divergence. This paper analyzes the mechanism on foreign trade from financial aspecl and discusses financial development framework under fiscal decentralization. It is found that:(1) financial improvement is beneficial to regional openness; (2) regional government intervention on financial system does harm to foreign trade; and (3) informal finance in some regions is beneficial to export development.
A key challenge for software engineering is to learn how to reconcile the formal world of the machine and its software with the non-formal real world. In this paper, we describe Problem Oriented Software Engineering (POSE), an approach that brings both non-formal and formal aspects of software development together within a single theoretical framework for software engineering design. We show how POSE captures development as the recordable and re-playable design theoretic transformation of software problems. Their representation and transformation allows for the identification and clarification of system requirements, the understanding and structuring of the problem world, the structuring and specification of a hard-ware/software machine that can ensure satisfaction of the requirements in the problem world, and the construction of adequacy arguments, convincing both to developers and to customers, users and other interested stake-holders, that the system will provide what is needed. Designs are recordable and re-playable through our adaptation of tactics, a (now standard) form of programming language used in transformational proof theoretic presentations. This brings to our system many other benefits of such approaches, including the ability to abstract from a captured design, and to combine programmatically captured designs. This paper provides an example-driven presentation of our framework for software engineering design.
Here is a fairly straightforward sketch of the theoretical structure of evidence law. Fact-finding involves decision-making under uncertainty,1 that is, in situations where we cannot be absolutely sure of where the truth lies. The best that fact-finders can do, then, is assess the probability of liability. Fact-finding should be conducted rationally, therefore we can think of it as governed by the rules of probability theory.2 These rules provide a framework within which fact-finders should draw on their general experience to assess the probability of the evidence presented and, ultimately, of the facts in issue. Because fact-finders make decisions under uncertainty, evidence law needs to provide rules specifying the degree of certainty required for a verdict. Such rules are termed standards of proof. Standards of proof can only be set by considering what is at stake in a finding of liability, so at this point accounts of the rules governing civil and criminal trials diverge. In civil trials, the basic presumption is one of equality between claimant and defendant: a mistake affecting one side is as serious as a mistake affecting the other. Decision theory can then be used to show that the civil standard of proof should be set at a probability of 0.5, the âbalance of probabilitiesâ, a rule which has the additional merit of minimizing the number of expected fact-finding errors. The presumption of equality does not apply to criminal trials, where the censure involved in a finding of liability, as well as the âhard treatmentâ which frequently follows such a finding, point to a higher standard of proof.3
This paper analyzes the reasons for appearing a small amount piping behind the seepage-proof walls in Zhengnan Huai River Levee and proposes the treatment method.
This chapter deals with the evolution of tax administration in Spain from the initial stages of the democratic process, way back in the second half of the seventies, up to the present time. Given the relevance of the classical interrelation between the tax reform processes and tax administration reforms, we review the main events and milestones in the last three decades. We analyze the influence that institutional, economic, and political factors have had on both the architecture of the tax administration and its organizational behavior. Nevertheless, based on what we have just said, the performance of the Spanish tax administration cannot be satisfactorily assessed without explicit reference to the deep decentralization experienced by the Spanish tax system from the early eighties, and especially since 1994. That is why a considerable part of the chapter is devoted to analyze the role played by the successive reforms of the Autonomous Communities' financing system, and the decisions of the regional governments themselves, in shaping Spain 's tax administration.
Narendra Kunapareddy, Parsa Mirhaji, David Richards, S. Ward Casscells
Although the decentralized and autonomous implementation of health information systems has made it possible to extend the reach of surveillance systems to a variety of contextually disparate domains, public health use of data from these systems is not primarily anticipated. The Semantic Web has been proposed to address both representational and semantic heterogeneity in distributed and collaborative environments. We introduce a semantic approach for the integration of health data using the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) developed by the Semantic Web community.
M. Georgoudakis, Christos Alexakos, ÎÎžÎ±ÎœÎŹÏÎčÎżÏ ÎαλογΔÏÎŹÏ, John Gialelis · 5 authors
This paper presents a distributed system architecture that is based on the prominent industrial standard ANSI / ISA-95 and utilizes ontologies and web services in an attempt to address the challenge of interoperability in the industrial enterprise environment in an efficient way. Work presented in this paper is partly financed by the PABADIS'PROMISE project framework (FP6-IST-016649). This paper proposes an agent-based approach, which assisted by an appropriate ontology attempts to match the properties of information agents and the generic requirements of the industrial automation domain in order to address automation information handling problems. The novelty of the approach lies in the utilization of ontological descriptions of the resources and the processes invoked by intelligent agents, while it couples production - related processes with shop floor equipment via standard Device Description Language, avoiding ad-hoc implementations. The benefits of this approach are optimal interoperability among the agents and adaptability in dealing with considerable changes in the industrial environment. Although ontological description of resources is hardly a new concept, the problem associated with this approach is the ad hoc methodology of description usually followed which renders the ontology to a dictionary usable only within the boundaries of the enterprise, thus of limited interoperability. The proposed framework is based on emerging web technologies such as Web Services, Ontology Web Language (OWL) and JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) agent platform while it introduces the following features: - ANSI / ISA 95 (2) based ontology implementation is used in order to model knowledge within the industrial environment domain.
Only for the recipients of foreign aid is something akin to central planning seen as a way to achieve prosperity. The end of poverty is achieved with free markets and democracyâwhere decentralized âsearchersâ look for ways to meet individual needsânot Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The PRSPs and MDGs create lots of bureaucracy but hold no one specific agency in foreign aid accountable for any one specific task. Planners in foreign aid use the old failed models of the pastâthe âFinancing Gapâ, the âpoverty trapâ, the government-to-government aid model; and the âexpenditures = outcomesâ mentality. Searchers in foreign aid would imitate the feedback and accountability of markets and democracy to provide goods and services to individuals until homegrown markets and democracy end poverty in the society as a whole. An example of the more promising âsearchersâ approach in foreign aid is 2006 Nobel Peace Laureate Mohammad Yunus and Grameen Bank.