Questa tesi si compone di tre capitoli. Nel primo capitolo, si presenta una rassegna della letteratura sui principali contributi teorici di modellazione per la progettazione della sicurezza sociale, assumendo gli individui come non-standard preferences. Ci concentriamo su tre approcci particolari: time inconsistent preferences, temptation preferences e myopia. Il secondo capitolo studia gli incentivi politici per la progettazione della politica di sicurezza sociale nelle democrazie competitive con le famiglie lungimiranti e miopi in un ambiente di probabilistic voting. In particolare, l'analisi si concentra sul trade-off tra le dimensioni e il grado di redistribuzione del sistema pensionistico. Il terzo capitolo introduce il comportamento miope di risparmio in un modello pensionistico a due paesi, in cui vengono confrontate le politiche pensionistiche non-cooperative e cooperative. Inoltre, questo capitolo analizza gli effetti di cooperazione per l'accumulo di capitale mondiale con la presenza di agenti miopi. / This dissertation consists of three chapters. In Chapter 1, I present a literature review on the main theoretical contributions modeling social security design assuming non-standard household preferences. We focus on three particular approaches: time inconsistent preferences, temptation preferences and myopia. Chapter 2 investigates the political incentives for the design of social security policy in competitive democracies with both far-sighted and myopic households in a probabilistic voting setting. In particular, the analysis focuses on the trade-off between the size and the redistribution degree of the equilibrium social security policy. Chapter 3 introduces myopic saving behavior in a two-country normative model of social security, in which non-cooperative and cooperative pension policies are compared. Moreover, this chapter analyzes the effects of cooperation to world capital accumulation with the presence of myopic agents.

Designing a completely secure and trusted system is a challenge that still needs to be addressed. Currently, there is no online system that is: (i) easy to use, (ii) easy to deploy, (iii) inexpensive, and (iv) completely secure and trusted. The proposed authentication techniques aim to enhance security and trust for video applications in the untrustworthy online environments. We propose a transparent multimodal biometric authentication (TMBA) for video conferencing applications. The user is identified based on his/her physiological and behavioral biometrics. The technique is based on a ‘Steps-Free’ method, where the user does not have to perform any specific steps during authentication. The system will authenticate the user in a transparent way. We propose authentication techniques as an additional security layer for various ‘user-to-user’ and ‘user-to-service’ systems. For ‘user-to-user’ video conferencing systems, we propose an authentication and trust establishment procedure to identify users during a video conference. This technique enables users that have never met before to verify the identity of each other, and aims at enhancing the user’s trust in each other. For ‘user-to-service’ video conferencing systems, we propose a transparent multimodal biometric authentication technique for video banking. The technique can be added to online transaction systems as an additional security layer to enhance the security of online transactions, and to resist against web attacks, malware, and Man-In-The-Browser (MITB) attacks. In order to have a video banking conference between a user and a bank employee, the user has to be logged in to an online banking session. This requires a knowledge-based authentication. Knowledge-based authentication includes a text-based password, the ‘Challenge Questions’ method, and graphical passwords. We analyzed several graphical password schemes in terms of usability and security factors. A graphical password scheme can be an additional security layer add-on to the proposed multimodal biometric video banking system. The combined techniques provide a multimodal biometric multi-factor continuous authentication system.

In recent years, the Smart Grid has grown to be the solution for future electrical energy that promises to avoid blackouts as well as to be energy efficient, environmentally and customer-friendly. In Smart Grid, the customer-friendly applications are a key element that provides the feature for recognizing the active expenditure of current energy via an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) subsystem. In fact, the smart meter, as a major part of AMI that is installed in residences, which provides more details about a consumer‟s usage. The smart meter measures hour-by-hour usage of a house, and then instantly transmits the record to the utility via two-way communications, unlike the previous electrical system that collects all usage monthly. However, the live measurement of the usage creates a potential privacy leak since each electrical usage records the behaviour of consumers in the home. Therefore, any communication channel between customers and utility should have some sort of confidentiality which protects consumer privacy. In reality, smart meters are generally located in an insecure area of the house (outside), therefore anyone can potentially tamper with the device, noting the fact that it is low-end device. As a result, there is a great possibility of compromising the smart meter, resulting in disclosure of consumer usage. Actually, the nature of a smart meter, and the cost constraints, create a challenge to secure the network. Therefore, the dual motivating problems are the protection of consumer privacy as well as achieving cost efficiency. In this research, we propose a new secure and compromise resilient architecture that continues two major components: a smart meters compromise attack detection scheme and a secure usage reporting protocol. Firstly, the smart meters compromise attack detection scheme improves the security of the smart meter, preventing an adversary from compromising the smart meter. Secondly, the secure usage reporting protocol improves the security of communication between the smart meter and the utility, preventing an adversary from identifying each household's usage reported by smart meters. / UOIT

Early in 2001 the federal government tabled Bill C-11, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), new comprehensive legislation intended to overhaul Canadas immigration laws. By this time, refugees had become singled out above other classes of immigrants as a threat to Canadian national security because a backlog of applicants had permitted thousands of failed refugee claimants to remain in Canada and allowed a small number of undesirable individuals to commit serious crimes and to plan and support terrorist activities. This led to public concern that refugees were a potential threat to public safety, national security, and even Canada-US relations. As a result, there were calls for Canada to tighten up its refugee system by adopting a more restrictive adjudication process for refugee claims. At the same time, there were calls for Canada to maintain a fair and open refugee system. This thesis uses discussions from parliamentary committees, an ethical analysis of the right of liberal states to exert sovereignty at the expense of their obligation to protect refugees, and key provisions in both the 1976 Immigration Acts and IRPA, to compare how the two important public goods discussed above, the rights of refugees and the need to protect national security, were balanced in the IRPA. Three major research questions guide this analysis: What provided the impetus for extra legal and security provisions in the IRPA related to refugees? Did amendments in the IRPA constitute a fundamental change to Canadas refugee determination system? Did the IRPA strike a right balance between safeguarding the rights of refugees and safeguarding national security? These questions represent key elements of the refugee/ security nexus, a problem that the IRPA was designed to address. My thesis finds that for the most part the IRPA provided a balanced legislative response to this problem and that it protected the rights of refugees and moderately enhanced provisions related to public safety and national security, although for the latter it did not constitute a marked improvement, nor for the former did it address the outstanding issue of security certificates. But these two deficiencies in the IRPA serve to highlight the inherent tension Canada has had enacting security measures while maintaining fundamental rights for refugees in a changing geo-political environment.

This thesis examines issues related to security interest, especially the security that holds after acquired property as well as present property, which are caused by discharge under bankruptcy procedure. This thesis also examines security interest valuation issue under proposal under Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. Both issues are related to the nature of security interest, which is, in my opinion, to hold the value of collateral at the time of realization. This thesis especially focuses on the security under after acquired clause, which holds interests in after acquired property as well as present property. In my view, the security on after acquired property has proprietary interest. It leads to the conclusion on the issue whether the security can attach to a property acquired after discharge.

This thesis examines issues related to security interest, especially the security that holds after acquired property as well as present property, which are caused by discharge under bankruptcy procedure. This thesis also examines security interest valuation issue under proposal under Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. Both issues are related to the nature of security interest, which is, in my opinion, to hold the value of collateral at the time of realization. This thesis especially focuses on the security under after acquired clause, which holds interests in after acquired property as well as present property. In my view, the security on after acquired property has proprietary interest. It leads to the conclusion on the issue whether the security can attach to a property acquired after discharge.

Computers are networked together in order to share the information they store and process. The internet connects many of these networks together, offering a multitude of options for communication, productivity and entertainment. It also offers the opportunity for unscrupulous individuals to contact these networked computers and attempt to appropriate or destroy the data on them, the computing resources they provide, and the identity or reputation of the computer user. Measures to secure networks need to be implemented by network administrators and users to protect their computing assets. <p>Firewalls filter information as it flows through a network. This filter can be implemented in hardware or software and can be used to protect computers from unwanted access. While software firewalls are considered easier to set up and use, hardware firewalls are often considered faster and more secure. Absent from the marketplace is an embedded hardware solution applicable to desktop systems. <p>Traditional software firewalls use the processor of the computer to filter packets; this is disadvantageous because the computer can become unusable during a network attack when the processor is swamped by the firewall process. Traditional hardware firewalls are usually implemented in a single location, between a private network and the internet. Depending on the size of the private network, a hardware firewall may be responsible for filtering the network traffic of hundreds of clients. This not only makes the required hardware firewall quite expensive, but dedicates those financial resources to a single point that may fail. <p>The dynamic silicon firewall project implements a hardware firewall using a soft-core processor with a custom peripheral designed using a hardware description language. Embedding this hardware firewall on each network interface card in a network would offer many benefits. It would avoid the aforementioned denial of service problem that software firewalls are susceptible to since the custom peripheral handles the filtering of packets. It could also reduce the complexity required to secure a large private network, and eliminate the problem of a single point of failure. Also, the dynamic silicon firewall requires little to no administration since the filtering rules change with the users network activity. The design of the dynamic silicon firewall incorporates the best features from traditional hardware and software firewalls, while minimizing or avoiding the negative aspects of each.

A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the advertiser. Advertising libraries require additional permissions, resulting in additional permission requests to users. Likewise, a malicious application could simulate the behavior of the advertising library, forging the user's interaction and effectively stealing money from the advertiser. This thesis describes AdSplit, where we extended Android to allow an application and its advertising to run as separate processes, under separate user-ids, eliminating the need for applications to request permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries. We also leverage mechanisms from QUIRE to allow the remote server to validate the authenticity of client-side behavior. In this thesis, we quantify the degree of permission bloat caused by advertising, with a study of thousands of downloaded apps. AdSplit automatically recompiles apps to extract their ad services, and we measure minimal runtime overhead. We also observe that most ad libraries just embed an HTML widget within and describe how AdSplit can be designed with this in mind to avoid any need for ads to have native code.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a critical routing protocol of the internet, used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems (ASes). BGP is highly vulnerable to many attacks that can cause routing disturbance on the internet. This paper describes BGP attacks, misconfigurations, causes of misconfigurations, impact of these attacks and misconfigurations in BGP and counter measures. Also we analyze new security architectures for BGP, comparison of these security protocols and their deployment issues. At the end we propose new security solution that is Defensive Routing Policy (DRP) to prevent BGP from malicious attacks and misconfigurations. DRP is operationally deployable and very effective to solve BGP problems.

Date: 30th May 2010 Authors: Rajia Rafique, Furhan Mehmood Tutor: Dr. Michael Le Duc, Dr. Deepak Gupta Title: Management of Operational Risks related to Information Security in Financial Organizations Introduction: Information security is very significant for organizations, especially for financial organizations where customer information and their satisfaction are considered the most important assets for financial organizations. Therefore customer information must be sustained from information security breaches in order to satisfy customers. Financial organizations use their customer’s information several times a day to deal with different operations. These operations contain several types of risks. Operational risks related to information security are becoming sensational for financial organizations. Financial organizations concentrate to reduce the exposure of operational risk related to information security because these risks can affect the business to a great extent. Financial organizations need such policies and techniques which can be used to reduce the exposure of operational risk and to enhance information security. Several authors discuss about several types of operational risk related to information security, and several authors discuss about the techniques to avoid these risks in order to enhance information security. Problem: Investigate the concept of Operational Risks related to Information Security and how it is perceived in Financial Organization? Purpose: The aspiration of writing this report is to describe and analyze operational risks related to information security in financial organizations and then to present some suggestions in form of polices or techniques which can be used by financial organizations to enhance their information security. Method: Since the type of our thesis is Qualitative based, therefore exploratory research approach is used to carry out research. Authors tried to use secondary source of information as well as primary source of information in order to get maximum knowledge about the topic and to come up with maximum possible output. Target Audience The target audience in our mind for this paper consists of both, academic readers and professionals who have interest and some knowledge about information security and operational risks. Target audience for this research work includes professionals, academic readers and both investigated organizations (NCCPL and CDC). Conclusion By critically analyzing the literature written by various authors and the worthy information provided by our primary sources gave us the opportunity to develop a solution to keep the operations secure from risks and to fix the current problems related to information security. We found that there are different types of operational risks related to information security which can affect the business of financial organizations and there are various techniques which can be used by financial organizations to solve the current issue related to operational risks in order to enhance information security. It was also found that top management in financial organizations is interested in issues about information security operational risk and they showed their keen interest in adopting new effective techniques. Keywords: Information Security, Information Security Risks, Operational Risks, Operational Risk Management, Operational Risks in Financial Organizations.