Sec-Auditor:A Blockchain-Based Data Auditing Solution for Ensuring Integrity and Semantic Correctness

Currently,there is a growing trend among users to store their data in the cloud.However,the cloud is vulnerable to persistent data corruption risks arising from equipment failures and hacker attacks.Additionally,when users perform file operations,the semantic integrity of the data can be compromised.Ensuring both data integrity and semantic correctness has become a critical issue that requires attention.We introduce a pioneering solution called Sec-Auditor,the first of its kind with the ability to verify data integrity and semantic correctness simultaneously,while maintaining a constant communication cost independent of the audited data volume.Sec-Auditor also supports public auditing,enabling anyone with access to public information to conduct data audits.This feature makes Sec-Auditor highly adaptable to open data environments,such as the cloud.In Sec-Auditor,users are assigned specific rules that are utilized to verify the accuracy of data semantic.Furthermore,users are given the flexibility to update their own rules as needed.We conduct in-depth analyses of the correctness and security of Sec-Auditor.We also compare several important security attributes with existing schemes,demonstrating the superior properties of Sec-Auditor.Evaluation results demonstrate that even for time-consuming file upload operations,our solution is more efficient than the comparison one.

SHT-based public auditing protocol with error tolerance in FDL-empowered IoVs

With the intelligentization of the Internet of Vehicles(lovs),Artificial Intelligence(Al)technology is becoming more and more essential,especially deep learning.Federated Deep Learning(FDL)is a novel distributed machine learning technology and is able to address the challenges like data security,privacy risks,and huge communication overheads from big raw data sets.However,FDL can only guarantee data security and privacy among multiple clients during data training.If the data sets stored locally in clients are corrupted,including being tampered with and lost,the training results of the FDL in intelligent IoVs must be negatively affected.In this paper,we are the first to design a secure data auditing protocol to guarantee the integrity and availability of data sets in FDL-empowered IoVs.Specifically,the cuckoo filter and Reed-Solomon codes are utilized to guarantee error tolerance,including efficient corrupted data locating and recovery.In addition,a novel data structure,Skip Hash Table(SHT)is designed to optimize data dynamics.Finally,we illustrate the security of the scheme with the Computational Diffie-Hellman(CDH)assumption on bilinear groups.Sufficient theoretical analyses and performance evaluations demonstrate the security and efficiency of our scheme for data sets in FDL-empowered IoVs.

双语审计Auditing本科教学的三重目标

文章设定了双语审计Auditing本科教学的三重目标:精确地洞察和理解英语国家"原汁原味"的审计理念和方法;通过两种语言的比较与切换,去不断发现和理解中外审计的异同,强化对基本审计知识与技能的学习,逐步形成审计学的价值判断;在国际环境下,以英语和汉语两种语言为媒介,通过审计行为、审计观念和审计技术的互相渗透、互相融合,培养学生的全球审计服务意识。

Extending Auditing Models to Correspond with Clients’ Needs in Cloud Environments

The user control over the life cycle of data is of an extreme importance in clouds in order to determine whether the service provider adheres to the client’s pre-specified needs in the contract between them or not, significant clients concerns raise on some aspects like social, location and the laws to which the data are subject to. The problem is even magnified more with the lack of transparency by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). Auditing and compliance enforcement introduce different set of challenges in cloud computing that are not yet resolved. In this paper, a conducted questionnaire showed that the data owners have real concerns about not just the secrecy and integrity of their data in cloud environment, but also for spatial, temporal, and legal issues related to their data especially for sensitive or personal data. The questionnaire results show the importance for the data owners to address mainly three major issues: Their ability to continue the work, the secrecy and integrity of their data, and the spatial, legal, temporal constraints related to their data. Although a good volume of work was dedicated for auditing in the literature, only little work was dedicated to the fulfillment of the contractual obligations of the CSPs. The paper contributes to knowledge by proposing an extension to the auditing models to include the fulfillment of contractual obligations aspects beside the important aspects of secrecy and integrity of client’s data.

Multi-indicator assessment of water environment in government environmental auditing

This study focused on a multi-indicator assessment methodology for governmental environmental auditing of water protection programs. The environmental status of Wuli Lake in China was assessed using the global indicators （driver-status-response） developed by the Commission on Sustainable Development, and four additional indicators proposed by the author： water quality, pollution load, aquatic ecosystem status, and lake sediment deposition. Various hydrological, chemical, biological and environmental parameters were used to estimate the values of the indicators for assessment of environmental status of the lake based on time series data sets for twenty years. The indicators proposed can be customized to meeting the needs for particular assessment of water protection programs. This method can be used to evaluate the performance of national environmental protection programs and provide technical support for environmental auditors.

WiBPA:An Efficient Data Integrity Auditing Scheme Without Bilinear Pairings

The security of cloud data has always been a concern.Cloud server provider may maliciously tamper or delete user’s data for their own benefit,so data integrity audit is of great significance to verify whether data is modified or not.Based on the general three-party audit architecture,a dynamic auditing scheme without bilinear pairings is proposed in this paper.It utilizes exponential operation instead of bilinear mapping to verify the validity of evidence.By establishing the mapping relation between logic index and tag index of data block with index transformation table,our scheme can easily support dynamic data operation.By hiding random numbers in the integrity evidence,our scheme can protect users’privacy information.Detailed security analysis shows that our scheme is secure against attacks such as forgery,replaying and substitution.Further experiments demonstrate that our scheme has lower computational overhead.

Reforming the natural resource auditing system from the ecological civilization perspective

Perfecting the natural resource system and auditing natural resource assets are requirements in protecting natural resources and developing an ecological civilization in practice.While the natural resource asset audit both confirms and quantifies natural resources,the nature of such resources makes it difficult to identify their ownership.Further,these resources'diversity creates complex measurement standards and activities,all of which require relevant institutional guarantees.However,the existing audit system for natural resource assets includes insufficient stock,incremental difficulties,and poor guidance,which cannot meet the requirements for environmental governance and an ecological civilization.Thus,it is necessary to define natural resource assets’rights and measurement systems and responsibility regulations,among others;construct an auditing participation system,technical regulations,and evaluation criterion for natural resource assets;amend the Audit Law in a timely manner;and enact natural resource asset legislation.Ultimately,such efforts would eliminate the bottleneck in the natural resource asset auditing system and facilitate the construction of a resource-saving,environmentally friendly society.

Big Data, Data Analytics and External Auditing

Big Data and Data Analytics affect almost all aspects of modern organisations’decision-making and business strategies.Big Data and Data Analytics create opportunities,challenges,and implications for the external auditing procedure.The purpose of this article is to reveal essential aspects of the impact of Big Data and Data Analytics on external auditing.It seems that Big Data Analytics is a critical tool for organisations,as well as auditors,that contributes to the enhancement of the auditing process.Also,legislative implications must be taken under consideration,since existing standards may need to change.Last,auditors need to develop new skills and competence,and educational organisations need to change their educational programs in order to be able to correspond to new market needs.

Energy Auditing and Improvement Scheme for Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences at Taibah University

In this work, a survey is used to investigate the current energy performance for Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences (previously Faculty of Engineering) at Taibah University in Medina city. The results of the survey show that several factors affect the energy performance in this building. It revealed that the building has been poorly designed from the point of view of thermal performance. Therefore, the building energy consumption needs to be monitored and maintained through energy auditing program. To determine the energy profile, the power consumption was calculated;the cooling load was estimated and analyzed to know the actual capacity required. The level of comfort in the building has been evaluated. Against the installed air conditioning capacity of 200-ton refrigeration, the cooling load calculations showed that the maximum cooling load needed, which is in August is only 83.22-ton refrigeration. In addition, illumination levels were measured and compared to the standard levels. Based on obtained results, two solutions were proposed: to install a building management system with approximate cost of 337,904 SR and to replace the existing chiller. Finally, the payback period for the proposed system has been estimated and found to be about 5.4 years.

A survey on blockchain-based integrity auditing for cloud data

With the rapid advancement of cloud computing,cloud storage services have developed rapidly.One issue that has attracted particular attention in such remote storage services is that cloud storage servers are not enough to reliably save and maintain data,which greatly affects users’confidence in purchasing and consuming cloud storage services.Traditional data integrity auditing techniques for cloud data storage are centralized,which faces huge security risks due to single-point-of-failure and vulnerabilities of central auditing servers.Blockchain technology offers a new approach to this problem.Many researchers have endeavored to employ the blockchain for data integrity auditing.Based on the search of relevant papers,we found that existing literature lacks a thorough survey of blockchain-based integrity auditing for cloud data.In this paper,we make an in-depth survey on cloud data integrity auditing based on blockchain.Firstly,we cover essential basic knowledge of integrity auditing for cloud data and blockchain techniques.Then,we propose a series of requirements for evaluating existing Blockchain-based Data Integrity Auditing(BDIA)schemes.Furthermore,we provide a comprehensive review of existing BDIA schemes and evaluate them based on our proposed criteria.Finally,according to our completed review and analysis,we explore some open issues and suggest research directions worthy of further efforts in the future.

A Privacy-Preserving TPA-aided Remote Data Integrity Auditing Scheme in Clouds

The remote data integrity auditing technology can guarantee the integrity of outsourced data in clouds. Users can periodically run an integrity auditing protocol by interacting with cloud server, to verify the latest status of outsourced data. Integrity auditing requires user to take massive time-consuming computations, which would not be affordable by weak devices. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving TPA-aided remote data integrity auditing scheme based on Li et al.’s data integrity auditing scheme without bilinear pairings, where a third party auditor (TPA) is employed to perform integrity auditing on outsourced data for users. The privacy of outsourced data can be guaranteed against TPA in the sense that TPA could not infer its contents from the returned proofs in the integrity auditing phase. Our construction is as efficient as Li et al.’s scheme, that is, each procedure takes the same time-consuming operations in both schemes, and our solution does not increase the sizes of processed data, challenge and proof.

Effects of the Beijing Subway Accident on Engineering Monitoring and Auditing

Ⅰ. Beijing Subway Line 10 Accident On March 28, 2007, six people were buried by a cave-in at Suzhoujie Station on Line 10 of the Beijing Subway. The fatalities were caused when the unit in charge of construction failed to implement a timely evacuation after a construction accident took place. (See Beijing Youth, April 1, 2007)……

Auditing and Energy Efficiency of a Ready-Made Garment Factory in Bangladesh: A Case Study

The possibilities for improving energy efficiency in ready-made composite garment factories in Bangladesh are assessed in this study. This work aims to understand the impacts of energy consumption on garment production and determine the scope of energy efficiency improvement based on energy-related data collected from a garment factory over a three-year period (2018-2020). Data from 2018 is used as the baseline and is compared to data from 2019 and 2020. It has been discovered that energy consumption has a seasonal impact. Despite the fact that electricity consumption decreased significantly during the 2020 pandemic, the energy consumption pattern in 2020 was found to be similar to that of 2018 and 2019. To improve energy efficiency, recommendations are made to modify the boiler, water pumps, gas generators, electrical motors, and lighting systems in specific ways. These suggested actions could save BDT 95 million (1.15 million US dollars) on power generation and BDT 20.5 million (0.25 million US dollars) on natural gas used for power and heat generation. These would result in a 3.75 percent reduction in the unit (kWh/kg) production energy requirement and a 3.65 percent reduction in natural gas usage per unit production, respectively, when compared to current conditions. Furthermore, these changes will provide an opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 9.78%.

Quality in Independent Auditing:A Research on Auditors

The aim of this study is to determine the opinion related to the audit quality of independent auditors in Turkey.For this purpose,a study was carried out on the auditors operating in the TRC 1 region and having an auditor certificate.Questionnaire method was used in the research.In the evaluation of the data,frequency,mean,and standard deviation were used as descriptive statistical methods.In addition,t-test and one-way ANOVA test were used to compare the data between independent groups.Research results show no significant difference between the opinions of the independent auditors according to various variables.

Generations Y and Z in Auditing—Solutions for Enthusing the Young Generations about a Job in the Audit Sector

The audit sector has a problem in recruiting junior staff,which is exacerbated by the changing desires of the youngest generations entering employment,Generations Y and Z,and supposedly by the growth of digitalization.Members of these generations apparently do not find working conditions in the audit sector attractive.This article therefore compares the audit sector’s requirements for potential employees with the expectations of Generations Y and Z of an employer,using the example of the German market.The sector’s requirements are determined with a content structuring qualitative content analysis of selected job advertisements.The expectations of the generations were elicited from the relevant literature,and especially from empirical studies.The analysis reveals the gap between the expectations of members of the youngest generations entering employment and the requirements of the audit sector.Subsequently,potential strategies for attracting sufficiently qualified young staff in the future are outlined.

Chinese Specific Independent Auditing Standard No.20 —Auditing in a Computer Information Systems Environment

Chapter 1 General provisionsArticle2The term“CIS environment”in this standard refers to an environment where a computer is involved in the processing of accounting information significant to the CPA’s audit.Chapter 2 General principlesArticle 4When performing an audit of the financial statements in a CIS environment,the CPA should consider the environment’s impact on the audit.However,the CPA should not change the objective and scope of the audit.

Classification of the Priority of Auditing XBRL Instance Documents with Fuzzy Support Vector Machines Algorithm

Concluding the conformity of XBRL(eXtensible Business Reporting Language)instance documents law to the Benford's law yields different results before and after a company's financial distress.A new idea of applying the machine learning technique to redefine the way conventional auditors work is therefore proposed since the unacceptable conformity implies a large likelihood of a fraudulent document.Fuzzy support vector machines models are developed to implement such an idea.The dependent variable is a fuzzy variable quantifying the conformity of an XBRL instance document to the Benford's law;whereas,independent variables are financial ratios.The interval factor method is introduced to express the fuzziness in input data.It is found the range of a fuzzy support vector machines model is controlled by maximum and minimum dependent and independent variables.Therefore,defining any member function to describe the fuzziness in input data is unnecessary.The results of this study indicate that the price-to-book ratio versus equity ratio is suitable to classify the priority of auditing XBRL instance documents with the less than 30%misclassification rate.In conclusion,the machine learning technique may be used to redefine the way conventional auditors work.This study provides the main evidence of applying a future project of training smart auditors.

The Cause of Auditing Expectation Gap

Previous literature show that auditors and the public have different understandings and beliefs about the auditor’s responsibilities.The public’s expectation of statutory audit may exceed the responsibility required by the auditing standard,which leads to the audit expectation gap.Since the 1980s,there are more and more criticisms on statutory auditors especially after the appearance of some auditing fraud such as Enron case in the United States and Maxwell’s case in the United Kingdom.The misunderstanding from the public makes the auditor face more and more challenges.The purpose of this paper is to discuss the components of the gap,and discuss the main reasons based on the existing literature and cases.This paper makes a critical evaluation of the audit expectation gap from three parts:performance gap,standard gap,and reasonableness gap,respectively.

Government auditing and corruption control: Evidence from China's provincial panel data

Since its foundation, China's government auditing system has played a very important role in maintaining financial and economic order and improving government accountability and transparency. Though a great deal of research has discussed the role of government auditing in discovering and deterring corruption, there is little empirical evidence on whether government auditing actually helps to reduce corruption. Using China's provincial panel data from 1999 to2008, this paper empirically examines the role of government auditing in China's corruption control initiatives. Our findings indicate that the number of irregularities detected in government auditing is positively related to the corruption level in that province, which means the more severe the corruption is in a province, the more irregularities in government accounts are found by local audit institutions.Also, post-audit rectification effort is negatively related to the corruption level in that province, indicating that greater rectification effort is associated with less corruption. This paper provides empirical evidence on how government auditing can contribute to curbing corruption, which is also helpful for understanding the role of China's local audit institutions in government governance and can enrich the literature on both government auditing and corruption control.

Effect of auditing: Evidence from variability of stock returns and trading volume

Although the benefits of auditing are uncontroversial in developed markets,there is scant evidence about its effect in emerging economies.Auditing derives its value by increasing the credibility of financial statements,which in turn increases investors’reliance on them in developed markets.Financial statement information is common to all investors and therefore increased reliance on it should reduce divergence in investors’assessment of firm value.We examine the effect of interim auditing on inter-investor divergence with a large sample of listed Chinese firms and find that it decreases more for firms whose reports are audited compared to non-audited firms.This finding suggests that investors rely more on audited financial information.Results of this study are robust to variations in event window length and specification of empirical measures.