In this paper we define formally a wide variety of separation-of-duty (SoD) properties, which include the best known to date, and establish their relationships within a formal model of role-based access control (RBAC). The formalism helps remove all ambiguities of informal definition, and offers a wide choice of implementation strategies. We also explore the composability of SoD properties and ...

For an information-agent-based system to support virtual (Internet-supported) organisations, changes in environmental conditions often demand changes in organisational behaviour, i.e., organisational changes. As organisational behaviour relates to organisational structure, rethinking the structure of an organisation as environmental conditions demand so, renders such an organisation imperativel...

We present CoMA (Conformance Monitoring by Abstract State Machines), a specification-based approach and its supporting tool for runtime monitoring of Java software. Based on the information obtained from code execution and model simulation, the conformance of the concrete implementation is checked with respect to its formal specification given in terms of Abstract State Machines. At runtime, un...

Recommender Systems have been successfully deployed in a variety of e-Commerce application scenarios. Customer selections of services or standard goods are supported as well as product configuration tasks. Little research has however been done on the application of Recommender Systems outside the virtual domain in real-world stationary trade. This surprises as on a business side, brick-and-mort...

Variety of computing systems have been proposed to provide protection for sensitive code or data through hardware or software mechanisms. This paper surveys the landscape of security verification approaches and techniques for hardware/software systems at different levels: from a software-application level all the way to the physical hardware level. Different existing projects are compared, base...

Agent-based on-line negotiation technology has the potential ability to radically change the way ebusiness is conducted. In this paper, we present a formal model for autonomous agents to negotiate on the Internet. In the basic negotiation scenario, we validate our model by showing that an agent will never make an offer that can possibly be exploited by its opponents. In our model, the negotiati...

With the growing use of wireless networks and mobile devices, we are moving towards an era where location information will be necessary for access control. The use of location information can be used for enhancing the security of an application, and it can also be exploited to launch attacks. For critical applications, such as the military, a formal model for location-based access control is ne...

Although widely used, traditional use case modeling does not provide explicit means which could be easily used for capturing and testing behavior compliance of the entities involved in a particular use case model. Specifically, a use case model (a set of use cases) related to a system under design provides neither an explicit abstraction to capture the “whole picture” of the behavior of the sys...

According to Barsalou (1992) frames as recursive attribute-value structures form the general format of cognitive concepts. Based on empirical research, Barsalou’s focus in developing frame theory was not on providing a formal theory. Our project proposes to both sharpen and generalize his intuitive conceptions by developing an adequate formal model for frames. Our goal is to obtain a better und...

Syndrome decoding is a more efficient method of decoding linear codes over finite fields over a noisy channel [5]. Thus, in this paper we investigate the generalization of the syndrome decoding to linear codes over finite commutative rings. A first generalization was given in [1] via Pontryagin duality. In the same direction we give another generalization using linear functional-based duality. ...