As modern technology continues to affect civilization, the issue of electronic rights grows in a global conversation. The right to be forgotten is a data protection regulation specific to the European Union but its consequences are creating an international stir in the fields of mass communication and law. Freedom of expression and privacy rights are both founding values of the United States which are protected by constitutional amendments written before the internet also changed those fields. In a study that analyzes the legal process of when these two fundamental values collide, this research offers insight into both personal and judicial views of informational priority. This thesis conducts a legal analysis of cases that cite the infamous precedents of Melvin v. Reid and Sidis v. F-R Pub. Corp., to examine the factors on which U.S. courts of law determinewhether freedom or privacy rules.

La question de la protection et de la valorisation des données de santé fait l’objet d’un renouvellement permanent car elle est tiraillée pas des intérêts contradictoires. Les logiques juridiques, sanitaires et économiques s’affrontent et s’expriment au travers d’une règlementation particulièrement fournie et disparate des données de santé. Le droit de propriété semble à même de concilier ces enjeux d’apparence antinomiques. Au regard de la place de ce droit dans notre ordonnancement juridique et de la singularité des données de santé, l’étude de leur rapprochement mérite une étude d’une certaine ampleur. Il s’agit dans un premier temps de s’assurer de la compatibilité de ce droit avec les données de santé. La réponse impose une vision de la propriété simplifiée pour finalement constater que les droits existants sur ces données sont en fait déjà des droits de propriétés mais qui, du fait de la particularité des données de santé, sont largement limités. Dans un second temps, se pose donc la question de la pertinence de l’application d’un droit de propriété plus « complet » aux données de santé. Or, on remarque que la spécificité de ces données est telle que cette solution n’est pas la plus efficace pour parvenir à un juste équilibre entre patients et collecteurs de données. Pour autant, d’autres solutions sont possibles. / The question of the protection and enhancement of health data is subject to a permanent renewal because it appears to be in the middle of some conflicting interests. Legal, health and economic logics confront and express themselves through a particularly heterogenous set of regulations on health data. Property rights here seem able to reconcile these issues that first look contradictory appearance issues. Given the place of this right in our legal system and uniqueness of health data, the study of their reconciliation deserves a study of some magnitude. This is a first step to ensure the compatibility of this law with health data. The answer requires a vision of simplified property only to find that the existing rights of the data is already in the property rights but which, because of the particularity of health data, are largely limited. Secondly, therefore the question of the relevance of the application of "more complete" property rights applies to health data. However, we note that the specificity of health data implies that such a the solution is not the most effective for achieving a fair balance between patients and data collectors. Nevertheless, other solutions are possible.

No description available.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Computer and Information Science

The application of higher-order PDA-based flow analyses to object-oriented languages enables comprehensive and precise characterization of program behavior, while retaining practicality with efficiency. We implement one such flow analysis which we've named OOCFA2. While over the years many advancements in flow analysis have been made, they have almost exclusively been with respect to functional languages, often modeled with the calculus. Object-oriented semantics--while also able to be modeled in a functional setting--provide certain structural guarantees and common idioms which we believe are valuable to reason over in a first-class manner. By tailoring modern, advanced flow analyses to object-oriented semantics, we believe it is possible to achieve greater precision and efficiency than could be had using a functional modeling. This, in turn, reflects upon the possible classes of higher-level analyses using the underlying flow analysis: the more powerful, efficient, and flexible the flow analysis, the more classes of higher-level analyses--e.g., security analyses--can be practically expressed. The growing trend is that smartphone and mobile-device (e.g., tablet) users are integrating these devices into their lives, in more frequent and more personal ways. Accordingly, the primary application and proof-of-concept for this work is the analysis of the Android operating system's permissions-based security system vis--vis potentially malicious applications. It is implemented atop OOCFA2. The use of a such a powerful higher-order flow analysis allows one to apply its knowledge to create a wide variety of powerful and practical security-analysis "front-ends"--not only the permissions-checking analysis in this work, but also, e.g., information-flow analyses. OOCFA2 is the first PDA-based higher-order flow analysis in an object-oriented setting. We empirically evaluate its accuracy and performance to prove its practical viability. We also evaluate the proof-of-concept security analysis' accuracy as directly related to OOCFA2; this shows promising results for the potential of building security-oriented "front-ends" atop OOCFA2.

With continued advances in computing, the amount of digital data continues to grow at an astounding rate. This has strained enterprise infrastructures and triggered development of service oriented architectures. In recent years, storage has also begun its transformation into a class of service. By outsourcing storage to an external storage service provider (SSP), enterprises not only cut management cost but also obtain on-demand infrastructure with superior disaster recovery and content dissemination capabilities. Wide deployment of this new outsourced storage environment requires solutions to many challenging problems. The foremost is the development of usable security and access control mechanisms that provide desirable levels of data confidentiality without placing an inordinate amount of trust into the SSP. This absence of a trusted reference monitor is a fundamental departure from traditional mechanisms and new solutions are required. The second important challenge is the autonomic management of SSP's infrastructure, uniquely characterized by a highly dynamic workload with large data capacity requirements. This dissertation research proposes models and techniques to address these two challenges. First, we introduce a novel access control system called xACCESS that uses cryptographic access control primitives (CAPs) to "embed" access control into stored data. This eliminates any dependency on the SSP for enforcement of security policies. We also analyze the privacy characteristics of its data sharing mechanisms and propose enhancements for more secure and convenient data sharing. We also develop a secure multiuser search approach that permits hosting of secured search indices at untrusted SSPs. We introduce a novel access control barrel (ACB) primitive that embeds access control into indices to prevent unauthorized information extraction during search. Our contribution to the autonomic SSP storage management has two important highlights. First, we have developed an impact analysis engine that efficiently analyzes the impact of a client-initiated change (workload surge, storage growth) on the SSP storage area network with minimal administrator involvement. Second, we have designed a new algorithm to quickly perform reallocation of resources in order to efficiently integrate the client change.

Fault tolerant and secure distributed data storage systems typically require that only up to a threshold of storage nodes can ever be compromised or fail. In proactively-secure systems, this requirement is modified to hold only in a time interval (also called epoch), resulting in increased security. An attacker or adversary could compromise distinct sets of nodes in any two time intervals. This attack model is also called the mobile adversary model. Proactively-secure systems require all nodes to "refresh" themselves periodically to a clean state to maintain the availability, integrity, and confidentiality properties of the data storage service. This dissertation investigates the design of a proactively-secure distributed data storage system. Data can be stored at storage servers using encoding schemes called secret sharing, or encryption-with-replication. The primary challenge is that the protocols that the servers run periodically to maintain integrity and confidentiality must scale with large amounts of stored data. Determining how much data can be proactively-secured in practical settings is an important objective of this dissertation. The protocol for maintain the confidentiality of stored data is developed in the context of data storage using secret sharing. We propose a new technique called the GridSharing framework that uses a combination of XOR secret sharing and replication for storing data efficiently. We experimentally show that the algorithm can secure several hundred GBs of data. We give distributed protocols run periodically by the servers for maintaining the integrity of replicated data under the mobile adversary model. This protocol is integrated into a document repository to make it proactively-secure. The proactively-secure document repository is implemented and evaluated on the Emulab cluster (http://www.emulab.net). The experimental evaluation shows that several 100 GBs of data can be proactively-secured. This dissertation also includes work on fault and intrusion detection - a necessary component in any secure system. We give a novel Byzantine-fault detection algorithm for quorum systems, and experimentally evaluate its performance using simulations and by deploying it in the AgileFS distributed file system.

Personal information, especially certified personal information, can be very valuable to its subject, but it can also be abused by other parties for identify theft, blackmail, fraud, and more. One partial solution to the problem is credentials, whereby personal information is tied to identity, for example by a photo or signature on a physical credential. We present an efficient scheme for large, redactable, digital credentials that allow certified personal attributes to safely be used to provide identification. A novel method is provided for combining credentials, even when they were originally issued by different authorities. Compared to other redactable digital credential schemes, the proposed scheme is approximately two orders of magnitude faster, due to aiming for auditability over anonymity. In order to expand this scheme to hold other records, medical records for example, we present a method for efficient signatures on redactable data where there are dependencies between different pieces of data. Positive results are shown using both artificial datasets and a dataset derived from a Linux package manager. Electronic credentials must of course be held in a physical device with electronic memory. To hedge against the loss or compromise of the physical device holding a user's credentials, the credentials may be split up. An architecture is developed and prototyped for using split-up credentials, with part of the credentials held by a network attached agent. This architecture is generalized into a framework for running identity agents with various capabilities. Finally, a system for securely sharing medical records is built upon the generalized agent framework. The medical records are optionally stored using the redactable digital credentials, for source verifiability.

The proposed research is in the area of attribute-based authorization systems. We address two specific research problems in this area. First, evaluating authorization policies in multi-authority systems where there are multiple stakeholders in the disclosure of sensitive data. The research proposes to consider all the relevant policies related to authorization in real time upon the receipt of an access request and to resolve any differences that these individual policies may have in authorization. Second, to enable a lot of entities to participate in the authorization process by asserting attributes on behalf of the principal accessing resources. Since it is required that these asserted attributes be trusted by the authorization system, it is necessary that these entities are themselves trusted by the authorization system. Two frameworks are proposed to address these issues. In the first contribution a dynamic authorization system is proposed which provides conflict detection and resolution among applicable policies in a multi-authority system. The authorization system is dynamic in nature and considers the context of an access request to adapt its policy selection, execution and conflict handling based on the access environment. Efficient indexing techniques are used to increase the speed of authorization policy loading and evaluation. In the second contribution, we propose a framework for service providers to evaluate trust in entities asserting on behalf of service users in real time upon receipt of an access request. This trust evaluation is done based on a reputation system model, which is designed to protect itself against known attacks on reputation systems.