Most existing work to thwart malicious web pages capture maliciousness via discriminative artifacts, learn a model, and detect by leveraging static and/or dynamic analysis. Unfortunately, there is a two-sided evolution of the artifacts of web pages. On one hand, cybercriminals constantly revamp attack payloads in malicious web pages. On the other hand, benign web pages evolve to improve content rendering and interaction with users. Consequently, the onceprecise detection techniques suffer from limitations to cope with the evolution, resulting in malicious web pages that escape detection. In this paper, we present EINSPECT, an evolution-aware and learning-based approach to address evolution of web page artifacts to more precisely analyze and detect malicious web pages. EINSPECT continuously tunes its detection models to automatically decide the best interplay of features and learning algorithms to embrace the evolution of web page artifacts into the analysis and detection. We have implemented and evaluated our approach and the results show that EINSPECT is able to improve the effectiveness of analysis and detection ofmalicious web pages while aligning the detection models with the continuous evolution of web page artifacts.

During the past few years a huge interests in e-voting has occurred, which resulted in a significant funding for e-voting research and development (R&D) projects with the aim of developing trustworthy e-voting systems. Although it is good that major e-voting development trends are capitalizing on previous R&D efforts in other domains, it is difficult to say that the necessary R&D efforts has been utilized to realize the vision and principles of e-voting. Today, we now have a much better understanding of the issues that pose the development of a trustworthy e-voting system. In this paper, we categorize and analyze the most important research and development trends in e-voting systems. We identify the lessons learned from these projects and analyze whether the existing R&D projects meet the identified flaws in past. Finally, based on these results the way to the future of e-voting R&D is postulated.

Vote verification allows voters or other election participating entities to verify that votes are correctly captured, stored and counted. To facilitate the vote verification process, a number of verification techniques (either physical or digital) have been developed to provide an evidence to voters and other participating entities for the assurance of the integrity of election result. However, we observed that these techniques have a number of limitations among which, the fact that the existing techniques do not fully comply with verification requirements (e.g., public verifiability). They implement limited prevention mechanisms from known attacks and they are not based on interoperable components and processes (typically, vendor lock-in). In order to address these issues, we propose a new method for vote verification based on open standards which allows interested parties or organizations to participate in vote verification process so as to enhance transparency and capture vote threats and challenges during and after elections.

Access to agricultural information services is vital to improve the livelihood of farmers in many directions specifically in the developing countries. There are several requirements for these services most of which stem from the nature and livelihood of involved stakeholders. Though various systems have been put to use so far, most failed to integrate these stakeholders in their requirement elicitation and design strategies. This paper uses a goal-oriented approach to provide an exhaustive view on the domain from specific design ideas to abstract requirements. The approach allows us to consider alternatives when developing novel services and to balance the impact that each design space can have on functional requirements of the system to-be. The analysis and design process took a bottom-up approach that starts from field study to the use of goal-oriented approach for the analysis and designing of requirements for the system to-be.

This paper presents a web-based tool to supplement defense against security misconfiguration vulnerabilities in web applications. The tool automatically audits security configuration settings of server environments in web application development and deployment. It also offers features to automatically adjust security configuration settings and quantitatively rates level of safety for server environments before deploying web applications. Using the tool, we were able to evaluate eleven server packages for Apache, PHP and MySQL across three operating system platforms. Our evaluation revealed that the tool is able to audit current security configuration settings and alert users to fix the server environment to achieve the level of safety of security configuration with respect to recommended configurations for real-life web application deployment.

Electronic voting systems are a perfect example of security-critical computing. One of the critical and complex parts of such systems is the voting process, which is responsible for correctly and securely storing intentions and actions of the voters. Unfortunately, recent studies revealed that various e-voting systems show serious specification, design, and implementation flaws. The application of formal specification and verification can greatly help to better understand the system requirements of e-voting systems by thoroughly specifying and analyzing the underlying assumptions and the security specific properties.This paper presents the specification and verification of the electronic voting process for the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) system. We used the ASTRAL language to specify the voting process of ES&S machines and the critical security requirements for the system. Proof obligations that verify that the specified system meets the critical requirements were automatically generated by the ASTRAL Software Development Environment (SDE). The PVS interactive theorem prover was then used to apply the appropriate proof strategies and discharge the proof obligations.

Intrusion detection systems are deployed on hosts in a computing infrastructure to tackle undesired events in the course of usage of the systems. One of the promising domains of applying intrusion detection is the healthcare domain. A typical healthcare scenario is characterized by high degree of mobility, frequent interruptions and above all demands access to sensitive medical records by concerned stakeholders. Migrating this set of concerns in pervasive healthcare environments where the traditional characteristics are more intensified in terms of uncertainty, one ends up with more challenges on security due to nature of pervasive devices and wireless communication media along with classic security problems for desktop based systems. Despite evolution of automated healthcare services and sophistication of attacks against such services, there is a reasonable lack of techniques, tools and experimental setups for protecting hosts against intrusive actions. This paper presents a contribution to provide a host-based, anomaly modeling and detection approach based on data mining techniques for pervasive healthcare systems. The technique maintains normal usage profile of pervasive healthcare applications and inspects current workflow against normal usage profile so as to classify it as anomalous or normal. The technique is implemented as a prototype with sample data set and the results obtained revealed that the technique is able to perform classification of anomalous activities.

Emerging technologies like mobile and wireless communication are offering promising opportunities to enable mobile healthcare delivery to citizens. But, enhancing the quality of service of such systems demands systematic improvement of existing service infrastructure. In this paper, we describe a context information refinement architecture proposed to address the shortcomings of existing works in relation to context information refinement in pervasive medical systems. The shortcomings are lack of adequate consideration for: quality parameters of context information, relevance of context information and particular requirements of the pervasive healthcare domain. The proposed architecture facilitates and coordinates the refinement of context information starting from acquisition of context information up until the refined context information is delivered to the target application in a pervasive medical system. We developed a prototype that implements the core components of the proposed architecture and evaluated it with real-life pervasive healthcare scenario and proved the validity of the architecture using a real-life scenario.

ICT seems well understood as a tool and an infrastructure for delivering information and services for the society and for allowing communications through interactions among the service users -mostly, the digital society. Using ICT for ensuring better life requires far more than good infrastructure, ICT know-how and the various techniques and tools in place. If ICT has to address the real problems of the society, it should be at a rescue being environment-friendly, with real and tangible impact, sustainable, seamless, down to the grass-roots and above all with reproducible experiences. In this paper, we introduce a different perspective of looking into and using ICT, which we call ICT for Good (ICT4G). It is about using ICT for addressing problems of societies with low ICT penetration and changing a society's life for the better. More specifically, based on our observation of current promises ICT gives to society, we discuss ICT4G's distinguishing aspects, opportunities it offers, challenges it imposes along with preliminary roadmap for its realization. A high-level correlation of what we pointed out with a relevant case study (i.e., the eGIF4M1) is presented.

Recently, two complementary approaches are proposed to represent, model, and analyze laws: the Nomos and VLPM approaches. Nomos is a goal-oriented approach to effectively capture high-level principles in terms of goal realization for requirements guided by satisfiability of normative propositions obtained from rules embedded in a law. The latter offers a tool supported (re-)engineering methodology to extract laws represented in XML and build models using a subset of UML diagrams. Both allow traceability between laws and their respective models. This paper proposes an integration of these two approaches. We believe that this provides a framework that allows to trace and reason either top-down, from principles to their implementation or, viceversa, bottom-up, from a change in the procedure to the principles. It is exactly this connection that adds value to the solution we propose and makes our approach more significant than a simple juxtaposition of the two techniques.

Recently, the use of formal methods to specify and verify properties of electronic voting (e-voting) systems, with particular interest in security, verifiability, and anonymity, is getting much attention. Formal specification and verification of such systems can greatly help to better understand the system requirements by thoroughly specifying and analyzing the underlying assumptions and security specific properties. Unfortunately, even though these systems have been formally verified to satisfy the desired system security requirements, they are still vulnerable to attack. In this paper we extend a formal specification of the ES&S voting system by specifying attacks that have been shown to successfully compromise the system. We believe that performing such analysis is important for two reasons: first, it allows us to discover some missing critical requirements for the specification and/or assumptions that were not met Second, it allows us to derive mitigation or counter-measure strategies when the system behaves differently than it should. We used the ASTRAL language for the specification, and the verification is performed using the PVS tool.

Experimental data sets related to e-voting systems are very demanding in order to improve currently deployed e-voting machines. Unfortunately, the studies of such data about the machines' security, performance and their evolution with respect to the social and technical aspects are still unsatisfactory. During the last four years we have been involved in the development, experimentation, and evaluation of an e-voting system. The system tried out in several regular elections, and also used in two small elections with legal value. Each experiment provided various sociological (e.g. citizens' opinions on the system) and technical data that are related to system's performance and behavior. In this paper, we present various technical insights and the lessons learned during the e-voting experiment. The methodology for the various experiments we have carried-out and the data sets collection process are also discussed. This helps to confirm existing data on the subject (e.g., data related to security, procedures and logistics) and, in some cases, provide novel information or, at least, shed a new perspective on some security-critical factors concerning e-voting systems.

Representing a law defining some procedures by means of workflow diagrams has various advantages: it facilitates the understanding of the actual meaning of its text, it helps to build a shared vision between law-makers and officers of the public administration, and it provides an easier way to analyze and make public administration procedures more efficient. To keep the model understandable and maintainable, however, the need soon arises to keep traceability between the workflow diagrams and the laws from which the workflows are derived. Moreover - since the public administration processes are defined and regulated by laws - when the workflows are the target of a re-engineering activity, such traceability information becomes essential to identify what laws need to be changed to implement the new procedures. This paper presents VLPM (visual law process modeler). It is a tool that addresses some of the issues mentioned above and that we have used to model the laws regulating the introduction of an electronic election in Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of the autonomous regions of Italy. VLPM is built on top of the UML visual paradigm tool and it is freely available.

The use of new technologies to support voting has been and is the subject of great debate. Several people advocate the benefits it can bring-such as improved speed and accuracy in counting, accessibility, voting from home-and as many are concerned with the risks it poses, such as unequal access (digital divide), violation to secrecy and anonymity, alteration of the results of an election (because of malicious attacks, bad design/coding, or procedural weaknesses). The attitude of different governments towards electronic voting (e-voting) varies accordingly. In this paper, we present the activities related to the development and formal verification of an e-voting system, called ProVotE. ProVotE is an end-to-end e-voting system with a voter verified paper audit trial, developed within the framework of a larger initiative whose goal is assessing the feasibility of introducing e-voting in the Autonomous Province of Trento. ProVotE has been used in trials and elections with legal value in Italy. What we believe to be of interest is the approach we took for its development, which has been based on a participatory design for the definition of the voter interface, on the usage of formal methods and model checking for the validation of the core logic of the machine, on open source components, and on the formal analysis of some critical procedures related to the usage of the machine during the election.

We are involved in a project related to the evaluation and possible introduction of e-voting for elections held in the Autonomous Province of Trento. One of the goals of the project is defining the laws and the procedures that will regulate e-voting and guarantee the same or an higher level of security than the traditional, paper-based, elections. To do so, we are tackling the problem (also) at the procedural level, namely, we are trying to understand weaknesses and strengths of the procedures regulating elections in Italy, in order to analyze possible attacks and their effects. The analyzes are based on formal specifications of the procedures and on model checkers to help us derive possible attacks. We believe the approach to be useful to help us systematically identifying the limits of the current procedures (i.e. under what hypotheses attacks are undetectable) and, consequently, to state more precisely under what hypotheses and conditions we can guarantee reasonably secure elections.

The goal of this paper is to present a logical framework for the formalization of agents' mutual beliefs in a Multi Agent system. The approach is based on a combination of extensional specifications of beliefs and context-based (finite) presentation of the specifications by employing a particular class of Multi Context systems. The extensional specification provides a set-theoretic characterization of beliefs in terms of sets closed under certain conditions. Its finite presentation is provided by using as constructors inference rules inside a Multi Context system. The resulting framework allows for capturing many relevant cases of real (not omniscient) agents, which are very common in Multi Agent scenarios embedded in real world environments. In order to substantiate this claim, two Multi Agent scenarios are formally specified in detail in the specification framework. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.