This thesis presents a hybrid information security approach for data on physical documents. This system, called CryptoPaper, allows portions of a physical document be printed with a machine-readable code. This code contains original data and related information security properties. To read this code and access the encoded data, a scanning device with suitable image recognition technology is used. Using a cloud-based access control system, it can be ensured that only authorized users can interpret the machine-readable code and additional security properties can be verified.

and keywords FinTech and AML from a legal perspective The subject matter of this thesis is the impact of regulations preventing money laundering and terrorism financing in the field of FinTech. The goal is to analyse these regulations and to offer a critical standpoint which would reflect the technological development in the financial sector and take into consideration the cost of adhering to these regulations. With this objective in mind, the first chapter defines the concept of FinTech, breaks down its specifics and provides typical examples of the financial services currently fitting this definition. In the second chapter, the obligations stemming from the AML/CFT rules are defined along with an evaluation of their impact on obliged persons. The current and future possibilities of remote identification which represents the simplest way of acquiring a client are further evaluated in a separate chapter. In the last part, this paper analyses the applicability of the AML/CFT Act in relation to neobanking, crowdfunding and crypto-assets. The paper concludes by summarizing the findings, formulating views on the current state of the topic, and presenting suggestions for future development. Money laundering and terrorism financing are detrimental social phenomena affecting the FinTech sector. The...

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From its establishment by royal decree in 1610 until its abolition in 1821, the Inquisition tribunal of Cartagena de Indias sought to stamp out heresy and maintain Catholic orthodoxy among the inhabitants of the territory of New Granada. This thesis examines the activities of the tribunal during the first half of the seventeenth century, specifically as they relate to its persecution of the crypto-Jews under its jurisdiction. While the surviving evidence demonstrates a significant crypto-Jewish presence in Cartagena in the 1600s, and even though the authority of this tribunal extended far beyond its immediate surroundings, very few crypto-Jews were ever prosecuted by this court during this time. This thesis explores the social, economic and political dynamics explaining a change in policy that led to a rise in the number of Inquisition trials against the crypto-Jewish population in the first half of the seventeenth century. This thesis argues that Spanish imperial politics coupled with socio-economic factors inherent in the colonial system, explains why inquisitorial persecution increased in this period.

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The focus of this work is crypto-ransomware; a variant of malware, an analysis of this malware’s network communication, and the identification of means by which it may be detected in the network. The thesis describes the methodology and environment in which the malware’s network communications were studied. The first part of the thesis provides a network traffic analysis of this type of malware with a focus on HTTP and DNS communication, including anomalies that can be observed in the network during this malware’s activity. The thesis also includes a discussion of the user behavior of devices infected by this type of malware. The resulting data was used to identify and describe four detection methods that are able to recognize the malware from its network communication using the HTTP protocol. Finally, a description of several signatures that can be used as indicators of a possible infection by this malware are provided.

The development of Internet technology has promoted the progress of all aspects of society. Under the background of Internet finance, the traditional financial model is changing, such as currency payment. With the deepening of Internet technology, the virtualization of money is deepening, and the market entry, trading and payment methods are also subverting the tradition. Bitcoin as a new means of payment began to appear in the public eye. It is a challenge to the traditional way of trading supported by Internet technology. Despite the constant controversy since its inception, Bitcoin still occupies a place with its unique advantages - Asymmetric encryption, decentralization,transparency of transaction records and so on. In the eyes of opponents, Bitcoin is more of a highly speculative asset, and as it becomes progressively more difficult to mine, the cost of mining is increasing. However, in the eyes of supporters, it is a reliable means of payment, not subject to government supervision, nor will it produce a virtual transaction record. From the regulator's point of view, it is more like a shelter for unscrupulous people to evade regulation and commit money laundering and crime. It is undeniable that in just a few years, Bitcoin has developed to a certain scale,has a certain industrial chain...

With the widespread usage of mobile devices and their applications, many areas of innovation have created a multitude of opportunities for mobile technologies to be deployed with very interesting effects. One such new area that emerged in the last few years is mobile commerce. It represents a system where various entities create real–life or digital assets, distribute information about them to interested consumers, execute transactions, accept various types of compensation methods, and finally deliver these assets; all of it in a secure and trusted manner, respecting users’ privacy. Since mobile devices are increasingly used for m-commerce, it is important to ensure that users’ data on such devices are kept secure. Mobile devices contain many of our personal and private data and information, since we nowadays use them for all kind of activities, both personal and professional. However, such data and information are not always treated in a secure and privacy friendly way. The goal of this thesis is to identify and provide solutions to security related problems found on mobile devices, such as communications, storage and mobile application design, and with the use of cryptocurrencies to combine the findings in the design of a secure mobile commerce system. As a result, this thesis describes a design and architecture of a secure e-commerce system, called eAgora, primarily exploiting mobile technology. The system is innovative as it treats digital goods, classified and called mobile commerce objects. Based on the attributes and anticipated use of such specific m–commerce objects, different security and privacy measures for each of them are needed and enforced. The goal was to design a system that deals with mobile commerce in a secure and privacy friendly way in all the lifecycle of the transactions. As users are mostly using mobile devices to connect to the proposed services, research first focused on mobile device security and privacy issues, such as insecure storage on the mobile device, insecure handling of user credentials and personal information, and insecure communications. Issues not only coming from the device itself but also from the nature of it; being mobile it is used in a different way that the classical desktop computers. Mobile devices are used in public, in an environment that cannot be controlled, and are interfacing a variety of networks that are not under the mobile device user’s control. Potential attackers’ interest was analysed in different mobile commerce scenarios in order to understand the needs for security enhancements. After having analyzed the possible threats, a methodology for mobile application development that would allow many common development errors to be avoided and security and privacy mechanisms to be considered by design was specified. Moreover, in order to provide secure storage and guard against active and passive intruder attacks, a secure Mobile Crypto Services Provider facility that allows storage of data on the UICC cards was designed and implemented. In order to secure communications, a secure e-mail application was designed and implemented. The application provides a user-friendly way to encrypt and sign e-mails, using the users’ already working e-mail accounts. The security functionality is completely transparent to users and ensures confidentiality and integrity of e-mail exchange. For the mobile commerce system, an architecture that enables exchange of m-commerce objects between different merchants, customers and retailers is proposed. Inthe architecture, policy enforcement and the feature to detect suspicious events that may be illegal and to cooperate with law enforcement was embedded. The newly defined technology of virtual currencies is used as a payment facilitator within the proposed architecture. Many of its innovative features are adopted but some are also extended, such as the secure use of the user wallet files, i.e. the files that link the user with the virtual currencies and enable payment transactions between customers and merchants. Although there is no distinction between different virtual currencies, Bitcoin is used as an example of a market valued trading currency to validate and evaluate the proposed secure e-commerce architecture and the findings have been applied on it. The thesis provides detailed use cases that demonstrate how the proposed architecture of eAgora functions in different complicated e-trading circumstances and how different security related mechanisms are used. The thesis concludes with the analysis of the research results and with proposed directions for future research and development works. / <p>QC 20150521</p>

Thesis advisor: Vyacheslav Fos / In the first essay, I examine the role of cross-listings in the digital token marketplace ecosystem. Using a unique set of publicly available and hand-collected data from 3,625 tokens traded in 108 marketplaces, I find significant increases in price and trading activity around the date of a token’s first cross-listing. Tokens earn a 49% raw cumulative return in the two weeks around the cross-listing date. Global token-trading volume is almost 50 times higher after cross-listing. Using the uniquely heterogeneous characteristics of token marketplaces, I am able to identify specific value-creation channels. I provide the first evidence supporting value creation through network externalities proposed by recent token-valuation models. Consistent with equity cross-listing theory, I find higher returns for cross-listings that reduce market segmentation and improve information production. In the second essay, we analyze a dataset of 4,003 executed and planned ICOs, which raised a total of $12 billion in capital, nearly all since January 2017. We find evidence of significant ICO underpricing, with average returns of 179% from the ICO price to the first day’s opening market price, over a holding period that averages just 16 days. After trading begins, tokens continue to appreciate in price, generating average buy-and-hold abnormal returns of 48% in the first 30 trading days. We also study the determinants of ICO underpricing and relate cryptocurrency prices to Twitter followers and activity. In the third essay, I examine reputation building by activist hedge funds and document two new findings with regard to hostile activism. First, there is evidence of a permanent reputation effect to hostile activism. Activist hedge funds that have engaged in hostile tactics, receive on average a 3% higher CAR [-10,+10] on their subsequent non-hostile campaigns, compared to hedge funds that have never engaged in hostile tactics. This abnormal return is positively correlated with the level of hostile reputation of the campaigning hedge fund. Second, I find that activist hedge funds with more hostile reputation modify their non-hostile activism style to engage “hostile-like” targets and pursue “hostile-like” objectives, but withhold the use of hostile tactics. These findings imply that hedge funds are able to build reputation using their past engagement tactics and that market participants value such reputation as evidenced by the higher announcement return observed in their targets. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.

With the emerging computing technologies and applications in the past decades, cryptography is facing tremendous challenges in its position of guarding our digital world. The advent of quantum computers is potentially going to cease the dominance of RSA and other public key algorithms based on hard problems of factorization and discrete logarithm. In order to protect the Internet at post-quantum era, great efforts have been dedicated to the design of RSA substitutions. One of them is code- based McEliece public key schemes which are immune to quantum attacks. Meanwhile, new infrastructures like Internet of Things are bringing the world enormous benefits but, due to the resource-constrained nature, require compact and still reliable cryptographic solutions. Motivated by this, many lightweight cryptographic algorithms are introduced. Nevertheless, side channel attack is still a practical threat for implementations of these new algorithms if no countermeasures are employed. In the past decades two major categories of side channel countermeasures, namely masking and hiding, have been studied to mitigate the threat of such attacks. As a masking countermeasure, Threshold Implementation becomes popular in recent years. It is sound in providing provable side channel resistance for hardware-based cryptosystems but meanwhile it also incurs significant overheads which need further optimization for constrained applications. Masking, especially for higher order masking schemes, requires low signal-to-noise ratio to be effective which can be achieved by applying hiding countermeasures. In order to evaluate side channel resistance of countermeasures, several tools have been introduced. Due to its simplicity, TVLA is being accepted by academy and industry as a one-size-fit-all leakage detection methodolgy that can be used by non-experts. However, its effectiveness can be negatively impacted by environmental factors such as temperature variations. Thus, a robust and simple evaluation method is desired. In this dissertation, we first show how differential power analysis can efficiently exploit the power consumption of a McEliece implementation to recover the private key. Then, we apply Threshold Implementation scheme in order to protect from the proposed attack. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time of applying Threshold Implementation in a public key cryptosystem. Next, we investigate the reduction of shares in Threshold Implementation so as to bring down its overhead for constrained applications. Our study shows that Threshold Implementation using only two shares reduces the overheads while still provides reliable first-order resistance but in the meantime it also leaks a strong second-order leakage. We also propose a hiding countermeasure, namely balanced encoding scheme based on the idea of Dual- Rail Pre-charge logic style in hardwares. We show that it is effective to mitigate the leakage and can be combined with masking schemes to achieve better resistance. Finally, we study paired t-test versus Welch's t-test in the original TVLA and show its robustness against environmental noises. We also found that using moving average in computing t statistics can detect higher-order leakage faster.