Authoritative and Unbiased Responses to Geographic Queries

A protocol for processing geographic data is proposed to guarantee authoritative and unbiased responses to geographic queries, without the need to rely on trusted third parties. The integrity of the proposed authoritative and unbiased geographic services (AUGS) protocol is guaranteed by employing novel hash tree based authenticated data structures (ADS) in conjunction with a blockchain ledger. Hash tree based ADSes are used to incrementally compute a succinct dynamic commitments to AUGS data. A blockchain ledger is used to record 1) transactions that trigger updates to AUGS data, and 2) the updated cryptographic commitments to AUGS data. Untrusted service providers are required to provide verification objects (VOs) as proof-of-correctness of their responses to AUGS queries. Anyone with access to commitments in ledger entries can verify the proof.

Blockchain Based Redistricting with Public Participation

Redistricting is the process of grouping all census blocks within a region to form larger subdivisions, or districts. The process is typically subject to some hard rules and some (soft) preferences to improve fairness of the solution. Achieving public consensus on the fairness of proposed redistricting plans is highly desirable. Unfortunately, fair redistricting is an NP hard optimization problem. The complexity of the process makes it even more challenging to convince the public of the fairness of the proposed solution. This paper proposes a completely transparent blockchain based strategy to promote public participation in the redistricting process, to increase public confidence in the outcome of the process. The proposed approach is based on the fact that one does not have to worry about how the NP hard problem was solved, as long as it is possible for anyone to compute a “goodness” metric for the proposed plan. In the proposed approach, anyone can submit a plan along with the expected metric. Only the plan with the best claimed metric needs to be evaluated in a blockchain network.

A Blockchain Based Framework for Information System Integrity

A blockchain based system integrity(BCSI)framework for assuring the integrity of information system processes is presented.BCSI is well suited for a broad class of large scale real-world information systems.Under the BCSI framework,the integrity of any information system I is assured by executing the finite state machine model for system I processes in a blockchain network.The BCSI framework is compared and contrasted with the Clark-Wilson(CW)system integrity model,and existing blockchain based frameworks like Ethereum.

An Efficient Trusted Computing Base for MANET Security

Devices participating in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are expected to strictly adhere to a uniform routing protocol to route data packets among themselves. Unfortunately, MANET devices, composed of untrustworthy software and hardware components, expose a large attack surface. This can be exploited by attackers to gain control over one or more devices, and wreak havoc on the MANET subnet. The approach presented in this paper to secure MANETs restricts the attack surface to a?single module?in MANET devices a trusted MANET module (TMM). TMMs are deliberately constrained to demand only modest memory and computational resources in the interest of further reducing the attack surface. The specific contribution of this paper is a precise characterization of simple TMM functionality suitable for any distance vector based routing protocol, to realize the broad assurance that “any node that fails to abide by the routing protocol will not be able to participate in the MANET”.

A Security Architecture for SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are attractive targets for attackers, as they offer an avenue to attack critical infrastructure (CI) systems controlled by SCADA systems. Ultimately, an attack on any system exploits some undesired (malicious or accidental) functionality in the components of the system. Unfortunately, it is far from practical to eliminate undesired functionality in every component of a system. The contribution of this paper is a novel architecture for securing SCADA systems that guarantee that “any malicious modification of the deployment configuration or the design configuration of the SCADA system will be detected”—even if undesired functionality may exist in SCADA system components.