Information Flow Control Research Articles

A permanent headquarters under construction? The Military Planning and Conduct Capability as a proximate principal

ABSTRACTThis article studies the European Union (EU) Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC), which was established in June 2017 and holds the strategic command of EU non-executive missions. While this is the closest the EU has ever come to a permanent military headquarters (HQ), the MPCC has not yet attracted much scholarly attention. This article fills this gap by applying principal-agent theorization about chains of delegation. It conceptualizes the MPCC as a proximate principal which has the potential to considerably affect control dynamics and information flows between Brussels and the mission command. Focusing on EUTM Mali, it assesses how the establishment of the MPCC affects control dynamics in non-executive CSDP missions. Empirics show that, despite some initial institutional friction, the establishment of the MPCC has mainly smoothened information flows from the mission to Brussels, particularly when the mission was militarily challenged, with little effect on PSC control or mission command autonomy.

Lattice-Modeled Information Flow Control of Big Sensing Data Streams for Smart Health Application

Internet of Things (IoT) provides a promising opportunity to build powerful data analytics systems with real time event detection for smart health, and therefore wearable IoT has become a rising source of big data streams for smart health, for which security needs to be assured by detecting real-time event to avoid malicious activities, and meanwhile to control the information leakage of big sensing data streams. I refer to this as an information flow control problem. To address this problem, this paper proposes a static lattice model for information flow control over big sensing data streams. I initialize two static lattices, i.e., sensor lattice for wearable sensors and user lattice for users, and then static lattices aim to process the flow control model faster, because I am dealing with high volume and velocity of data streams. The experimental evaluation and results of the information flow model show that it can excellently handle the incoming big data streams with low latency and buffer requirement.

Automatic integration testing through collaboration diagram and logic contracts

Component-based software development can effectively increase software development efficiency through component reuse. Integration testing is an important technical means to guarantee the quality of software systems composed of components. Aiming at the problem that the scale of software systems is getting larger and larger, and manual design of test cases is costly and difficult, we propose an automatic approach for integration test cases generation based on collaboration diagram and logic contracts. By extracting control flow information from collaboration diagram and combining with contracts as component specification, an intermediate model called execution tree of components is established, then test cases are automatically generated through contract solving technology. This approach not only realizes path coverage, but also completes the automatic integration testing of software system, thereby improving test efficiency and reducing test cost.

Routing Hippocampal Information Flow through Parvalbumin Interneuron Plasticity in Area CA2

The hippocampus is critical for the formation of episodic memory. It is, therefore, important to understand intra-hippocampal circuitry, especially in the often overlooked area CA2. Using specific transgenic mouse lines combined with opto- and chemogenetics, we show that local plasticity of parvalbumin-expressing interneurons in area CA2 allows CA3 input to recruit CA2 pyramidal neurons (PNs), thereby increasing the excitatory drive between CA3 and CA1. CA2 PNs provide both stronger excitation and larger feed-forward inhibition onto deep, compared with superficial, CA1 PNs. This feed-forward inhibition, largely mediated by parvalbumin-expressing interneurons, normalizes the excitatory drive onto deep and superficial CA1 PNs. Finally, we identify a target of CA2 in area CA1, i.e., CA1 PNs, whose soma are located in stratum radiatum. These data provide insight into local hippocampal circuitry and reveal how localized plasticity can potentially control information flow in the larger hippocampal network.

Guest Editorial: Special Section on Transient Behaviors of Multi-Timescale Megawatt Power Electronics Systems

With the rapid development of a new generation of power systems and high power traction, megawatt power electronics receives increasingly more global attention for enhanced capability and reliability. Megawatt power electronics apparatuses and systems are composed of control units, high-power semiconductor devices, passive elements, and generalized connecting parts, in which effective transformation and transmission of electric power are achieved via the control of information flow over energy flow. When considering multiple time-scales, the megawatt power electronics systems turn into a combination of linearity and nonlinearity, and also the one of discrete and continuous quantities, which results in complicated transient phenomena. In addition, scalability and modularity become growing trends for the megawatt power converters, which are preferred by the manufacturers.

Fine-grained information flow control using attributes

Information flow control (IFC) mechanisms regulate where information is allowed to travel. To enhance IFC, access control encryption (ACE) was proposed where both the no write-down rule and the no read-up rule are supported. Nevertheless, there are still two issues: (1) how to determine whether a communication request should be permitted or denied was not considered; (2) the commutation cost is linear with the number of receivers.Attribute-based system (ABS) can implement one-to-many communication and fine-grained access policies. In this paper, a new IFC scheme is proposed by combing ACE with ABS. Our scheme provides the following features: (1) IFC policies are defined over a universe set of attributes; (2) the computation cost to determine whether a communication request should be permitted or denied is constant, instead of linear with the number of required attributes or receivers; (3) weak attribute privacy is achieved; (4) fine-grained access policies on encrypted data are supported; (5) the communication cost is linear with the number of required attributes and is independent of the number of receivers. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first IFC scheme enforced by using attributes.

Recent advances in cloud data centers toward fog data centers

Recent advances in cloud data centers toward fog data centers

Information flow control in object‐based peer‐to‐peer publish/subscribe systems

SummaryIn this paper, we propose a P2PPSO (P2P [peer‐to‐peer] type of topic‐based Publish/Subscribe with Object concept) model, where each peer process (peer) exchanges objects by publishing and receiving event messages with no centralized coordinator. In addition, objects are characterized by topics. Suppose an event message ej published by a peer pj carries an object on some topics into a target peer pi. Here, information in the peer pj illegally flows to the peer pi if the target peer pi is not allowed to subscribe the topics. An illegal object is an object whose topics a target peer is not allowed to subscribe. Even if an event message is received by a target peer by checking topics, objects carried by the event message may be illegal at the target peer. In this paper, we propose a TOBS (topics‐of‐objects–based synchronization) protocol to prevent target peers from receiving illegal objects in the P2PPSO model. Here, even if an event message is received by a target peer, illegal objects in the event message are not delivered to the target peer. In the evaluation, we show how many event messages carry illegal objects in the TOBS protocol.

227. Utilization of Social Network Analysis To Understand Birth Control Uptake In Youth Who Experience Homelessness

Within the U.S., 4.3% of 13-17-year old’s and 12.5% of 18-25-year old’s experienced homelessness during the past year. Female homeless youth become pregnant at a rate five times greater than that of the general U.S. population, with nearly half becoming pregnant at least once during adolescence. Developing trusted, healthy relationships is a challenge for youth who are homeless. Networks can represent a potentially diverse groups of people who provide tangible or intangible resources to the individual, but also may encourage engagement in unhealthy or risky behavior. This exploratory study examines implementation data from a teen pregnancy prevention program to better understand how homeless youth social networks share information and how that information can impact the uptake of birth control. To measure interpersonal relationships, we used a social network analysis (SNA) to assess the quality and strength of peer relationships. SNA is an ideal technique for this study because the study population is part of a bounded network defined by program participation. Eleven 14 to 18 years old participants took part in this study. Most participants were sexually active (n=9) and had first engaged in consensual sex at 13 to 18 years (M=15 years) of age. None of the participants were using birth control before the program. Data were collected through interviews and participants were asked which peers in the program they knew, who they trusted, and if they shared (or received) information on birth control. Data was symmetrized and density and centrality statistics were analyzed. At the end of the program, 73% of the network participants were on some type of birth control at one-month follow-up. However, network density showed that only 14.3% of the network shared information about birth control. To understand if one or a few people controlled the information, centralization was analyzed on birth control information sharing. The whole network centralization was 0.339. This means that the sharing information network was centralized (> than 0.25). Degree centrality was then examined to understand who controlled information flow. One participant had a degree of 8 ties and four others had a degree of 5 ties each. Four of these 5 participants adopted some form of long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) by the end of the program. One person was using condoms. While overall network density was not very high, centralization was significant which means that a few key players controlled the information flow. The majority of these individuals (4 of 5) adopted LARC by the end of the program, which may indicate that the information they shared with their peers about birth control influenced other youth’s decisions on adoption. This exploratory study expands the limited research on the impact of social support on homeless youth and pregnancy prevention. 73% birth control utilization, one-month post-intervention, among a high-risk subpopulation that was not previously on birth control represents important findings for research on homeless youth.

From fine- to coarse-grained dynamic information flow control and back

We show that fine-grained and coarse-grained dynamic information-flow control (IFC) systems are equally expressive. To this end, we mechanize two mostly standard languages, one with a fine-grained dynamic IFC system and the other with a coarse-grained dynamic IFC system, and prove a semantics-preserving translation from each language to the other. In addition, we derive the standard security property of non-interference of each language from that of the other, via our verified translation. This result addresses a longstanding open problem in IFC: whether coarse-grained dynamic IFC techniques are less expressive than fine-grained dynamic IFC techniques (they are not!). The translations also stand to have important implications on the usability of IFC approaches. The coarse- to fine-grained direction can be used to remove the label annotation burden that fine-grained systems impose on developers, while the fine- to coarse-grained translation shows that coarse-grained systems---which are easier to design and implement---can track information as precisely as fine-grained systems and provides an algorithm for automatically retrofitting legacy applications to run on existing coarse-grained systems.

When Sports Challenge Authority: A Case Study of Gatekeeping During the 2017 Chinese Ping-Pong Boycott

At the World Tour Platinum China Open in 2017, 3 leading Chinese table tennis players and two coaches withdrew from the Games to protest the sudden removal of Head Coach Liu Guoliang, triggering unprecedented public uproar online. Applying gatekeeping theory, this study explored how mainland Chinese media controlled information flow during the crisis. A thematic analysis uncovered 3 primary gatekeeping behaviors: repetition, selection, and manipulation. Findings suggest that the party-state, not media institutions, was the dominant gatekeeper in mainland China. The Chinese media system and sports system were both subject to strict government control during a crisis that challenged authority.

Photoreceptive retinal ganglion cells control the information rate of the optic nerve

Information transfer in the brain relies upon energetically expensive spiking activity of neurons. Rates of information flow should therefore be carefully optimized, but mechanisms to control this parameter are poorly understood. We address this deficit in the visual system, where ambient light (irradiance) is predictive of the amount of information reaching the eye and ask whether a neural measure of irradiance can therefore be used to proactively control information flow along the optic nerve. We first show that firing rates for the retina's output neurons [retinal ganglion cells (RGCs)] scale with irradiance and are positively correlated with rates of information and the gain of visual responses. Irradiance modulates firing in the absence of any other visual signal confirming that this is a genuine response to changing ambient light. Irradiance-driven changes in firing are observed across the population of RGCs (including in both ON and OFF units) but are disrupted in mice lacking melanopsin [the photopigment of irradiance-coding intrinsically photosensitive RGCs (ipRGCs)] and can be induced under steady light exposure by chemogenetic activation of ipRGCs. Artificially elevating firing by chemogenetic excitation of ipRGCs is sufficient to increase information flow by increasing the gain of visual responses, indicating that enhanced firing is a cause of increased information transfer at higher irradiance. Our results establish a retinal circuitry driving changes in RGC firing as an active response to alterations in ambient light to adjust the amount of visual information transmitted to the brain.

Secure serverless computing using dynamic information flow control

The rise of serverless computing provides an opportunity to rethink cloud security. We present an approach for securing serverless systems using a novel form of dynamic information flow control (IFC). We show that in serverless applications, the termination channel found in most existing IFC systems can be arbitrarily amplified via multiple concurrent requests, necessitating a stronger termination-sensitive non-interference guarantee, which we achieve using a combination of static labeling of serverless processes and dynamic faceted labeling of persistent data. We describe our implementation of this approach on top of JavaScript for AWS Lambda and OpenWhisk serverless platforms, and present three realistic case studies showing that it can enforce important IFC security properties with modest overhead.

Engineering non-equilibrium quantum phase transitions via causally gapped Hamiltonians

We introduce a phenomenological theory for many-body control of critical phenomena by engineering causally-induced gaps for quantum Hamiltonian systems. The core mechanisms are controlling information flow within and/or between clusters that are created near a quantum critical point. To this end, we construct inhomogeneous quantum phase transitions via designing spatiotemporal quantum fluctuations. We show how non-equilibrium evolution of disordered quantum systems can create new effective correlation length scales and effective dynamical critical exponents. In particular, we construct a class of causally-induced non-adiabatic quantum annealing transitions for strongly disordered quantum Ising chains leading to exponential suppression of topological defects beyond standard Kibble–Zurek predictions. Using exact numerical techniques for 1D quantum Hamiltonian systems, we demonstrate that our approach exponentially outperforms adiabatic quantum computing. Using strong-disorder renormalization group (SDRG), we demonstrate the universality of inhomogeneous quantum critical dynamics and exhibit the reconstructions of causal zones during SDRG flow. We derive a scaling relation for minimal causal gaps showing they narrow more slowly than any polynomial with increasing size of system, in contrast to stretched exponential scaling in standard adiabatic evolution. Furthermore, we demonstrate similar scaling behavior for random cluster-Ising Hamiltonians with higher order interactions.

Company Valuation Specialists’ Interactions with Management and Auditors: A Field Study

Company specialists engaged by management may be delegated a monitoring role by auditors, creditors, or investors, and reduce information asymmetry present in fair value measurements (FVMs). Utilizing in-depth interviews with Norwegian company specialists and audit partners this study investigates factors potentially impacting company specialists’ effectiveness as monitors of the reliability of FVMs and how such factors challenge auditors’ reliance on their monitoring. The findings suggest that company specialists are not immune to management pressure and several influence tactics are documented. Furthermore, as company specialists strategically guard their private information (e.g., valuation models or non-client specific information) auditors are forced to rely on external, and potentially biased, information sources to evaluate the objectivity and reliability of the company specialists. While auditors often request that clients engage several specialists to alleviate concerns about conflicts-of-interest, management seems to anticipate this and strategically controls information flow between the specialists to create more persuasive evidence. The findings provide support for theoretical predictions from agency theory and financial economics and enhances our understanding of specialists’ delegated monitoring effectiveness.

СУЧАСНІ ТЕОРІЇ МЕНЕДЖМЕНТУ І СТАЛИЙ РОЗВИТОК: ТОЧКИ ПЕРЕТИНУ

СУЧАСНІ ТЕОРІЇ МЕНЕДЖМЕНТУ І СТАЛИЙ РОЗВИТОК: ТОЧКИ ПЕРЕТИНУ

Balance gate controlled deep neural network

Abstract By mimicking the information expression ways in human's brain, deep neural network refers to a deeply structured framework with multiple processing layers that attempt to model high-level abstractions of the data. It is becoming a mainstream technology for pattern recognition, data mining and intelligent control at industrial scale. Previous work on constructing very deep networks, such as convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network, makes complex tasks such as image classification feasible. However, they are very limited when dealing with irregular data whose features are unstructured or even unknown. The traditional fully connected neural network is contrarily too shallow to extract high-level features. In this paper, we present a balance gate controlled deep network structure to deepen the fully connected neural network. It uses a new gating strategy to control information flow and increase network stability. Experimental results on both irregular regression and time-series forecasting demonstrate that the proposed network out-performs other ad-hoc models and is easier to train in a deeper form than the fully connected neural network.

Secure‐CamFlow: A device‐oriented security model to assist information flow control systems in cloud environments for IoTs

SummaryRecent developments in the cloud technologies have motivated the migration of distributed large systems, specifically the Internet of Things to the cloud architecture. Since Internet of Things consist of a vast network and variety of objects, the cloud platform proves to be an ideal option. It is essential for the proper functioning of the Internet of Things to be able to share data among the system processes. The biggest problem faced during the transition of the IoTs to the cloud is the security of data especially while data sharing within the cloud and among its tenants. Information Flow Control mechanisms are one of the many solutions to enable a controlled sharing of data. Integration of Information Flow Control Systems to the existing architecture requires various levels of re‐engineering efforts. Moreover, most of the Information Flow Control systems focus on data flow within the cloud and neglect the security and integrity of data while it is being transferred to the cloud from various devices. This research focuses on securing the entire process of data migration to cloud from devices while the in‐cloud data flow is monitored by the Information Flow Control policies specified by the users. We have developed a prototype for the proposed model, and results are evaluated on the basis of energy consumption and execution time. As proposed model provides security services such as privacy, integrity, and authentication, hence it takes more execution time and consumes more energy as compared with the existing model.

How to improve corporate social responsibility in the era of artificial intelligence?

Corporate social responsibility is one of the most important competitiveness in the sustainable development of a company. In recent years, various issues of the company, such as Facebook’s influence on people’s emotions through controlling information flow, and Google’s self-driving cars causing personal injuries, have caused concern on the issue of corporate social responsibility in the era of artificial intelligence. Based on this, it has become very necessary to explore how to improve corporate social responsibility in artificial intelligence. Corporate social responsibility have a duty to manage conflicts of interest, including current and long-term interests, local interests and overall interests, anthropocentrism and sustainable development, etc. We propose to strengthen the construction of corporate social responsibility in the era of artificial intelligence from several perspectives, such as enhancing public awareness of social responsibility, transcending the dimension of time and space, thinking about corporate social responsibility, focusing on sustainable development, and rethinking corporate behavior standards.

Topological interface states due to spontaneous symmetry breaking in a chain of anharmonic oscillators

In this work, we propose a one-dimensional system of coupled anharmonic oscillators with nonlinear coupling and study a spontaneous formation of interface excitations in the linearized spectrum of such periodic array. We show that during its evolution such system can undergo a topological transition from the disordered and topologically trivial phase into the nontrivial one. The topological transition is accompanied by the formation of the interface state in the spectrum of linearized excitations of the equilibrium state. Employing the technique based on the calculation of mean chiral displacement we demonstrate that the in-gap interface state exhibits a topological nature and is analogous to that in the well-known Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. Our results demonstrate the formation of topological interface state induced by spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism and open novel possibilities for designing various nonlinear electronic, photonic and polaritonic systems with disorder-robust control of information flows.