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The Web of Governance and Democratic Accountability
Terrell A. Northrup, Stuart J. Thorson

Developments in e-government are resulting in fundamental reorganizations of the ways in which democratic governments operate as well as in the ways in which citizens relate to their own and to other governments and to each other. Of special relevance here are the manners in which institutions and citizens are becoming interconnected into a complex web of governance via largely uncoordinated information networks. This paper examines how this web of governance is simultaneously producing changes in individual citizen's senses of identity and challenges to conventional notions of accountability in liberal democratic systems. Together, it is argued these suggest moving focus from e-government (the institutions of government) to e-governance (the larger web of formal and informal institutions, organizations, norms, traditions, authority structures, groups and behaviors within which individuals and groups live their lives.

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Highly Assured Computer Engineering
Shiu-Kai Chin, Susan Older

Engineering is fundamentally about the creation of systems with desired properties. Engineers strive to calculate properties of their implementations before actual construction begins. Our goal is to elevate professional practice in computer engineering to the point where system properties such as correctness, safety, and security are routinely verified for hardware and software systems. Achieving this goal requires devising a practical "linear-systems theory" for computer engineering, as well as incorporating the engineering curriculum design and analysis techniques that use predicate calculus and mathematical logic. If successful, the consequences are that rigorous design assurance would be routine and complexity would be managed by a theory of composition or block-diagram algebra similar to the way linear-systems theory and system-transfer functions manage complexity in electrical engineering.

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Building a Rigorous Foundation for Assurance into Information Assurance Education
Shiu-Kai Chin, Susan Older

Syracuse University is one of thirty six National Security Agency designated Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education. Our IA program was developed within the Center for Systems Assurance (CSA), whose mission is to promote improvement in systems and information assurance through research, education, and technology transfer. A key, and we believe unique, component of our program is our emphasis on using formal mathematics and logic to provide a rigorous basis for the assurance of information and information systems. All students in our program must take a combination of courses that provide hands-on experience both in building systems and in using formal models to analyze and evaluate system behavior. In this paper, we discuss our experiences in developing and delivering a Systems Assurance program in which mathematical logic is an integral component.

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A Broader Look at Competition and Cooperation:
New Abstractions for Building and Regulating the Communications Sector
P.H. Longstaff

Just when it looked like almost everyone (from business leaders to academics to politicians) had reached some agreement that more competition could bring real benefits to economic systems, the rules seem to have changed. This may mean that everyone was operating with an inaccurate or incomplete view of "how things work" with regard to competition. This paper takes a broad view of how competition and cooperation work and finds some surprising clues for how to "burst through" our current abstractions.

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Competition in the Communications Sector: Can Unpredicable Systems be Regulated?
P.H. Longstaff

Who is responsible for the fact that competition did not thrive in the communications sector? Unless you can believe in a giant conspiracy theory that involves virtually every elected official, countless staffers, agency heads, civil servants, and industry leaders in dozens of countries, the answer may be "no one." It certainly did not work out the way many people thought it would, but is that somebody's fault? Or was the real mistake a failure to manage expectations?

During the 20th Century experts in many fields came to the conclusion that when many forces are at work on a system it tends to get very complex and essentially unpredictable. Some have even concluded that in complex organizations unintended consequences are virtually inevitable. This was not easy to accept for people (particularly in western cultures) who had spent hundreds of years trying to describe and predict the world with mathematical accuracy. But it has become an article of faith for many (but not all) practitioners in disciplines from physics to economics. It remains a difficult concept for business managers and policy makers who want to believe that their actions will lead to predictable outcomes. But the unanticipated outcomes of competition policy are now too frequent and too important to ignore. It is time to seriously reconsider our assumptions about the processes we are trying to regulate and the process of regulation itself.

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Declining Competition in Telecommunications: Could This Have Been Predicted?
P.H. Longstaff

This paper is an interdisciplinary work that looks at the forces of intraindustry competition and how they are similar to intraspecies competition. In both systems competition is seen in two different modes: the scramble and the contest. Recognizing which mode is important to predicting the future of the system and any attempts to regulate it. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these similarities on competition policy and how they can be seen in the 2001 Report on Competition Policy by the European Commission. The paper is an expansion and refinement of some of the work done in the author's new book and includes a list of possible overlaps in biology and business, with examples from the communications sector. This can serve as a list of possible research projects to test the validity of these ideas. The author believes the ideas in this paper can be used to analyze any situation in which two or more entities must either compete or cooperate to get a scarce resource. Scenarios for business planning and regulation can be developed with this these ideas, even in complex systems where competitive and cooperative behavior cannot not always be predicted. The author hopes that this work will stimulate interest in an interdisciplinary and international study of the fundamentals of competition and cooperation.

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Competition in Networks: Moving Forward by Going Back to the Basics
P.H. Longstaff

This paper will help business leaders and regulators make sense of the chaos that developed in networked industries after privatization and liberalization. It asserts that the best way to make predictions about the future of networked industries is to learn the characteristics and problems that are "basic" to all of them. This new and broader perspective will be especially helpful when (and if) various networks "converge" and set up a situation where the business and regulatory models of several networks must come together, often in more than one country.
The paper begins with a review of the nature networked systems and then identifies ten characteristics that are common to all networked industries (including communication, transportation and energy): senders, receivers, channels, transport, traffic/payload, security, signaling, scheduling, terminals and ancillaries. It then discusses four problems that are common to all networked industries: bottlenecks access to the network, and the special economics of small vs. large traffic and short vs. long hauls. Since all networks have these things in common we can look to all of them for clues about how networks really operate. We are not restricted to looking at communications networks when we need new insights about some of our most pressing problems. For example, this paper sets out some important lessons for telecommunications networks that can be found in the introduction of competition into airline networks. The paper also identifies special considerations for internetwork and intranetwork competition. It discusses the role of cooperation in networks and why this makes them difficult for competition regulators to analyze.

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Reliable Heterogeneous Applications
Joohan Lee, Steve J. Chapin, Stephen Taylor

This paper explores the notion of computational resiliency to provide reliability in heterogeneous distributed applications. The notion of reliability provides both software fault tolerance and the ability to tolerate information warfare (IW) attacks. This technology seeks to strengthen a military mission, rather than protect its network infrastructure using static defense measures such as network security, intrusion sensors, and firewalls. Even if a failure or attack is successful and never detected, it should be possible to continue information operations and achieve mission objectives.
Computational resiliency involves the dynamic use of replicated software structures, guided by mission policy, to achieve reliable operation. This paper examines a prototype concurrent programming technology to support computational resiliency in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. The performance of the technology is explored through two example applications.

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Type-Assisted Dynamic Buffer Overflow Detection
Kyung-suk Lhee, Steve J. Chapin

Programs written in C are inherently vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks. Functions are frequently passed pointers as parameters without any hint of their sizes. Since their sizes are unknown, most run time buffer overflow detection techniques rely on signatures of known attacks or loosely estimate the range of the referenced buffers. Although they are effective in detecting most attacks, they are not infallible. In this paper, we present a buffer overflow detection technique that range checks the referenced buffers at run time. Our solution is a small extension to a generic C compiler that augments executable files with type information of automatic buffers (local variable and parameters of functions) and static buffers (global variables in data/bss section) in order to detect the actual occurrence of buffer overflow. It also maintains the sizes of allocated heap buffers. A simple implementation is described with which we currently protect vulnerable copy functions in the C library.

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Assuring Consistency and Increasing Reliability in Group Communication Mechanisms in Computational Resiliency
Norka Lucena, Steve J. Chapin, Joohan Lee

The Computational Resiliency library (CRLib) provides distributed systems with the ability to sustain operation and dynamically restore the level of assurance in system function during attacks or failures. In the presence of arbitrary faults, replicated threads need to agree on the values received in order to achieve consistency, when doing group communication in CRLib. To guarantee data integrity and increase reliability, we have implemented a variant of the Lamport-Shostak-Pease oral message algorithm for the Byzantine Generals problem, which provides fuzzy agreement as well as a reduction of the expected communication overhead. Instead of agreeing on the original messages, which could be extremely large, agreement is performed over the 160-bit hashes of normalized messages computed using SHA-1. Performance measurements of applications using CRLib supporting both fail-stop and arbitrary failure models indicate that a reasonable overhead in execution time is worth paying in cases when Byzantine failures are expected.

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Oblivious SignatureBased Envelope
Ninghui Li, Wenliang(Kevin) Du, Dan Boneh

Exchange of digitally signed certificates is often used to establish mutual trust between strangers that wish to share resources or to conduct business transactions. Automated Trust Negotiation (ATN) is an approach to regulate the flow of sensitive information during such an exchange. Previous work on ATN are based on access control techniques and cannot handle cyclic policy interdependence satisfactorily. We show that the problem can be modeled as a 2-party secure function evaluation (SFE) problem and propose a scheme called oblivious signature-based envelope (OSBE) for efficiently solving the SFE problem.

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Using Randomized Response Techniques for Privacy-Preserving Data Mining
Wenliang(Kevin) Du, Zhijun Zhan

Privacy is an important issue in data mining and knowledge discovery. In this paper, we propose to use the randomized response techniques to conduct the data mining computation. Specifically, we present a method to build decision tree classifiers from the disguised data. Our results show that although the data are disguised, our method can still achieve fairly high accuracy. We also show how the parameters used in the randomized response techniques affects the accuracy of the results.

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A Witness-Based Approach For Data Fusion Assurance In Wireless Sensor Networks
Wenliang(Kevin) Du, Jing Deng, Yunghsiang S. Han, Pramod K. Varshney

In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are spread randomly over the coverage area to collect information of interest. Data fusion is used to process these collected information before they are sent to the base station, the observer of the sensor network. We study the security of the data fusion process in this work. In particular, we propose a witness-based solution to assure the validation of the data sent from data fusion nodes to the base station. We also present the theoretical analysis for the overhead associated with the mechanism, which indicates that even in an extremely harsh environment, the overhead is low for the proposed mechanism.

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Using An Instructional Operating System In Teaching Computer Security Courses
Wenliang(Kevin) Du

To address national needs for computer security education, many universities have incorporated computer and security courses into their undergraduate and graduate curricula. In these courses, students learn how to design, implement, analyze, test, and operate a system or a network to achieve security. Pedagogical research has shown that effective laboratory exercises are critically important to the success of this type of courses. However, such effective laboratories do not exist in computer security education.
To fill this gap, we have developed an instructional operating system, SMinix, based on the instructional OS (Minix) developed for operating system and network courses.

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Testing for Software Vulnerability Using Environmental Perturbation
Wenliang(Kevin) Du, Aditya P. Mathur

We describe a methodology for testing a software system for possible security flaws. Based on the observation that most security flaws are caused by the program's inappropriate interactions with the environment, and triggered by user's malicious perturbation on the environment (which we call an environment fault), we view the the security testing problem as the problem of testing for the fault-tolerance properties of a software system. We consider each environment perturbation as a fault and the resulting security compromise a failure in the toleration of such faults. Our approach is based on the well known technique of fault-injection. Environment faults are injected into the system under test and system behavior observed. The failure to tolerate faults is an indicator of a potential security flaw in the system. An Environmental-Application Interaction (EAI) fault model is proposed which guides us to decide what faults to inject. Based on EAI, we have developed a security testing methodology, and apply it to several applications. We successfully identified a number of vulnerabilities including vulnerabilities in Windows NT operating system.

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Implementing a Calculus for Distributed Access Control in Higher Order Logic and HOL
Thumrongsak Kosiyatrakul, Susan Older, Polar Humenn, Shiu-Kai Chin

Access control - determining which requests for services should be honored or not - is particularly difficult in networked systems. Assuring that access-control decisions are made correctly involves determining identities, privileges, and delegations. The basis for making such decisions often relies upon cryptographically signed statements that are evaluated within the context of an access-control policy.

An important class of access-control decisions involves brokered services. The CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) CSIv2 (Common Secure Interoperability version 2) protocol is an internationally accepted standard for secure brokered services. Showing that protocols such as CSIv2 fulfill their purpose requires reasoning about identities, statements, delegations, authorizations, and policies and their interactions. We use formal logic and a theorem prover to meet this challenge.

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Wireless Internet Access: 3G vs. WiFi?
Lee W. McKnight, William Lehr

This article compares and contrasts two technologies for delivering broadband wireless Internet access services: "3G" vs. "WiFi". The former, 3G, refers to the collection of third generation mobile technologies that are designed to allow mobile operators to offer integrated data and voice services over mobile networks. The latter, WiFi, refers to the 802.11b wireless Ethernet standard that was designed to support wireless LANs. Although the two technologies reflect fundamentally different service, industry, and architectural design goals, origins, and philosophies, each has recently attracted a lot of attention as candidates for the dominant platform for providing broadband wireless access to the Internet. It remains an open question as to the extent to which these two technologies are in competition or, perhaps, may be complementary. If they are viewed as in competition, then the triumph of one at the expense of the other would be likely to have profound implications for the evolution of the wireless Internet and structure of the service provider industry.

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Internet, Social Capital, and Democracy in the Information Age:
Korea’s Defeat Movement, the Red Devils, Candle Light Anti-U.S.
Demonstration, and Presidential Election during 2000-2002
Jongwoo Han

Drawn to unparalleled opportunities created by cyberspace, social scientists have attempted to identify the impact of the information technology revolution on democratic governance. Will new technologies promote democracy? If so, how will they change the political landscape and interact with preexisting factors in society? These questions are closely related to one of the most distressing indicators for the future of democracy, the undiminishing presence of an apolitical constituency, especially within the young generation. Thus, the excluded young generation had no voice, leaving the foundation of political systems vulnerable to the issues of democratic unaccountability and weak legitimacy. This phenomenon arose from the mechanism of the public sphere in the industrial age, which is geared toward maintaining the existing power relationships rather than toward reflecting changes in society. Korea’s recent experience has clearly indicated that in the information age, the Internet, when combined with social capital, can change such disproportionate power relationships. The Internet as a new public sphere successfully serves as an explosive means of reconnecting the tacit majority with social issues and empowering the mostly apolitical young generation as a new political force. In so doing, it will be the most critical feature on the future map of power configuration in democracy. This article argues that information technology alone does not determine the successful evolution of democracy. Rather, it is social capital that produced unprecedented political revolution in Korea. This suggests that the impact of information technology on the prospects for a country’s democracy is highly dependent upon its social capital. This article analyzes how major socio-political breakthroughs were accomplished and how the transitions in social capital from offline to online were facilitated in Korea by the Internet. 

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Context Sensitive Anomaly Monitoring of Process Control Flow to Detect Mimicry Attacks and Impossible Paths
Haizhi Xu,Wenliang Du, and Steve J. Chapin

Many intrusions amplify rights or circumvent defenses by issuing system calls in ways that the original process did not. Defense against these attacks emphasizes preventing attacking code from being introduced to the system and detecting or preventing execution of the injected code. Another approach, where this paper fits in, is to assume that both injection and execution have occurred, and to detect and prevent the executing code from subverting the target system. We propose a method using waypoints: marks along the normal execution path that a process must follow to successfully access operating system services.Waypoints actively log trustworthy context information as the program executes, allowing our anomaly monitor to both monitor control flow and restrict system call permissions to conform to the legitimate needs of application functions. We describe our design and implementation of waypoints and present results showing that waypoint-based anomaly monitors can detect a subset of mimicry attacks and impossible paths.

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