Policy Enforcement Mechanisms Research Articles

Proactive enforcement of provisions and obligations

We present an approach to the proactive enforcement of provisions and obligations, suitable for building policy enforcement mechanisms that both prevent and cause system actions. Our approach encompasses abstract requirements for proactive policy enforcement, a system model describing how enforcement mechanisms interact with and control target systems, and concrete policy languages and associated enforcement mechanisms. As examples of policy languages, we consider finite automata and timed dynamic condition response (DCR) graphs. We use finite automata to illustrate the basic principles and DCR graphs to show how these principles can be adapted to a practical, real-time policy language. In both cases, we show how to algorithmically determine whether a given policy is enforceable and, when this is the case, construct an associated enforcement mechanism. Our approach improves upon existing formalisms in two ways: (1) we exploit the target system’s existing functionality to avert policy violations proactively, rather than compensate for them reactively; and (2) rather than requiring the manual specification of remedial actions in the policy, we deduce required actions directly from the policy.

Entrepreneurship development in photovoltaic technological innovation system: a case study in Iran

Purpose This paper aims to develop a causal feedback structure that explains the dynamics of entrepreneurship development in Iran’s photovoltaic (PV) technological innovation system (TIS) to design effective policy interventions for fostering PV innovation. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts the system dynamics approach to develop the causal structure model. The methodology follows a systematic method to elicit the causal structure from qualitative data gathered by interviewing several stakeholders with extensive knowledge about different aspects of Iran’s PV TIS. Findings Lack of technological knowledge and financial resources within Iranian PV panel-producing firms are the main barriers to entrepreneurship development in Iran’s PV TIS. This study proposes two policy enforcement mechanisms to tackle these problems. The proposed feedback mechanisms contribute to the domestic PV market size and knowledge transfer from public research organizations to the PV industry. Practical implications The proposed policy mechanisms aid Iranian policymakers in designing effective policy interventions stimulating innovation in Iran’s PV industry. Originality/value The main contributions of this study include conceptualizing the causal structure capturing entrepreneurship dynamics in emerging PV TIS and proposing policy mechanisms fostering entrepreneurship and innovation in PV sectors.

Impact of MEPS Policies on Carbon Emissions: A Comparative Study of China and the United States

This comparative analysis evaluates the impact of MEPS policies on carbon emissions in China and the United States, two of the world's largest carbon emitters. The analysis provides valuable insights for policymakers, researchers, and stakeholders in energy efficiency and carbon reduction. It reveals that both nations have achieved significant carbon emission reductions through the implementation of MEPS policies, particularly in the residential and non-resource-based sectors. However, the study also uncovers stark differences in policy implementation, targeted sectors, and enforcement mechanisms between the two countries. In the United States, the mature market for energy-efficient technologies and robust policy enforcement mechanisms have amplified the impact of MEPS. In contrast, China's heavy reliance on coal and regional disparities in energy efficiency present unique challenges to the implementation and impact of MEPS policies. Despite these challenges, China has made substantial progress, particularly in the construction sector and in provinces outside resource-based regions. The study concludes with recommendations for enhancing the effectiveness of MEPS policies, including improving policy design, strengthening enforcement, expanding coverage to additional sectors, and addressing regional disparities. It underscores the need for continued research and international collaboration to drive further progress in carbon emission reduction.

Health Data Sharing towards Knowledge Creation

Data sharing and service reuse in the health sector pose significant privacy and security challenges. The European Commission recognizes health data as a unique and cost-effective resource for research, while the OECD emphasizes the need for privacy-protecting data governance systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to health data access in a hospital environment, leveraging homomorphic encryption to ensure privacy and secure sharing of medical data among healthcare entities. Our framework establishes a secure environment that enforces GDPR adoption. We present an Information Sharing Infrastructure (ISI) framework that seamlessly integrates artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for data analysis. Through our implementation, we demonstrate the ease of applying AI algorithms to treated health data within the ISI environment. Evaluating machine learning models, we achieve high accuracies of 96.88% with logistic regression and 97.62% with random forest. To address privacy concerns, our framework incorporates Data Sharing Agreements (DSAs). Data producers and consumers (prosumers) have the flexibility to express their prefearences for sharing and analytics operations. Data-centric policy enforcement mechanisms ensure compliance and privacy preservation. In summary, our comprehensive framework combines homomorphic encryption, secure data sharing, and AI-driven analytics. By fostering collaboration and knowledge creation in a secure environment, our approach contributes to the advancement of medical research and improves healthcare outcomes. A real case application was implemented between Portuguese hospitals and universities for this data sharing.

POLITICS OF COVID-19 RESPONSE AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN NIGERIA AND KENYA

This article analyses the intersection of response to Covid-19 and human rights in Nigeria and Kenya, as both countries illustrate two Covid-19 endemic and rapidly responding states to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, in Nigeria and Kenya, response to Covid-19 has to be understood in relation to their respective legal and policy frameworks and policy enforcement mechanisms. The paper notes that cases of police brutality, extortion and assault on civilians during Covid-19 pandemic raise the issue of insecurity and the whole question of human rights. The paper demonstrates that governments’ emergency measures have serious implications for fundamental rights in Nigeria and Kenya, particularly those of perceived violators of the measures, the poor and vulnerable people, and women and girls.

Local Content Requirements in Nigeria's Extractive Sector and the Implications for Sustainable Development

AbstractThis article examines the framework of Nigeria's local content laws and policy, and the implications for sustainable development. The legislation is geared towards safeguarding local productivity and aiding the progressive aspirations of Nigeria's citizens. While commendable in principle, there have been questions about policy articulation, implementation and enforcement mechanisms, especially with regard to the Sustainable Development Goals. The article examines the local content legislation in Nigeria, and how policies have shaped the community-corporate nexus. This exposes the challenges facing extractive resource governance in a jurisdiction such as Nigeria and the discourses that have permeated legal scholarship on the practical deference to local content by non-state actors. It considers that well designed and implemented local content requirements are catalysts for structural development. To achieve sustainable development of its extractive sector, Nigeria requires state-led determination to stimulate economic growth and development. The article argues for continuous consultation as a bedrock for meaningful engagement.

A joint sharing approach for online privacy preservation

Online social networks (OSNs) have shown rapid growth in the past decade and are consistently growing at a high rate. OSNs provide an efficient way of performing online social interactions, data sharing, and multimedia communications with millions of internet users. Along with the advantages, OSNs also raise some security and privacy challenges. Currently, available sharing mechanisms can protect data associated with a single user but lack in protecting data associated with multiple users. Considering privacy issues related to multiparty online objects, this research proposes a collaborative sharing model that works on the principles of joint sharing to fulfill privacy needs of OSN users on shared objects. The proposed model follows multiparty authorizations, the socio-technical concepts of joint sharing, and joint-ownership policy enforcement mechanism. It also supports a fine-grained automated conflict resolution method for jointly owned objects. Formal verification of the proposed model is performed through Petri-nets, its semantics are validated through ontologies, while a third-party Facebook application is developed for proof of concept. The analysis of users’ response, performed through the technology acceptance model (TAM), reflects an 81% acceptance of the proposed joint sharing model.

Potential carbon leakage under the Paris Agreement

Carbon leakage is the effect of emissions transferring to certain countries due to others having a stricter climate policy. This phenomenon is shown to have undercut the effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol. Considering the increasingly globalised nature of the world economy, carbon leakage may have an even greater potential under the Paris Agreement some 15 years later. Although a more global approach to combatting climate change, the Paris Agreement is susceptible to leakage because of its lack of policy harmonization and enforcement mechanisms. Here, we perform the first quantitative analysis of the potential for carbon leakage under Paris, using the GTAP-E general equilibrium model of the world economy with energy and carbon emissions to analyse leakage effects under six scenarios. Two of these scenarios analyse regions implementing climate policy in isolation, two greater participation, but still not harmonized, global Paris Agreement policy, and a further two analyse the effect of a US withdrawal from the agreement. Both cases are considered with and without the US withdrawal. Our analysis demonstrates that there is potential for significant carbon leakage effects, in line with the rates produced from studies on the Kyoto Protocol. Depending on model elasticities, we find medium carbon leakage in the range of 1–9% (with a central estimate of 3–4%) under co-ordinated Paris Agreement policy across countries, compared to high leakage of 8–31% when countries operate in isolation. However, scenarios where the USA withdraws from the agreement result in roughly doubling of leakage rates, in the range of 3–16% (central estimate 7%), which demonstrates the vulnerability of the Paris Agreement in its current form. To limit leakage effects, greater policy co-ordination to achieve consistent implicit carbon prices is needed across countries.

DIOXIN: runtime security policy enforcement of fog applications

Fog computing is an emerging distributed computational paradigm that moves the computation towards the edge (i.e., where data are produced). Although Fog operating systems provide basic security mechanisms, security controls over the behaviour of applications running on Fog nodes are limited. For this reason, applications are prone to a variety of attacks. We show how current Fog operating systems (with a specific focus on Cisco IOx) are actually unable to prevent these attacks. We propose a runtime policy enforcement mechanism that allows for the specification and enforcement of user-defined security policies on the communication channels adopted by interacting Fog applications. We prove that the proposed technique reduces the attack surface of Fog computing w.r.t. malicious applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique by carrying out an experimental evaluation against a realistic Fog-based IoT scenario for smart irrigation.

Blockchain-Powered Policy Enforcement for Ensuring Flight Compliance in Drone-Based Service Systems

Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, can be used for commercial services such as short-dis-tance delivery. In order to ensure quality services, multiple drone-based delivery service providers can be employed in delivery service systems. In this article, we address two very important and unexplored challenges of employing drones in delivery services. First, involving multiple drones from different service providers elevates the chance of collision during flights. Second, drones may hamper the privacy of citizens by unauthorized access to private and restricted areas. In order to solve the aforementioned issues, we propose a blockchain-based policy enforcement mechanism in the drone-based delivery service systems. At first, the mechanism will set policies to establish pre-allocated flight paths for different drones at different times to avoid collisions, and ensure the privacy of citizens by restricting their access to unauthorized areas. Later, the blockchain will enforce the policies to monitor compliance of the drone flights and identify non-compliant drone services to penalize corresponding service providers. We simulate a virtual drone-based delivery system with the Ethereum blockchain platform and examine the performance and feasibility of our proposed mechanism.

Factors that limit the development, prototyping and adoption of informal innovations in Zimbabwe: Lessons for policymakers

This study explored the obstacles that informal innovators encounter in product development, prototyping, commercialization and adoption of informal innovations in Zimbabwe. Altogether 20 informal innovators were purposively selected, interviewed and observed. Key findings are that the lack of knowledge of intellectual property rights stifle their innovation and creativity, as most innovators rely on copying designs of products that are already on the market. Their lack of knowledge of intellectual property protection rights and poor marketing platforms and strategies have limited the profits of informal innovators as they succumb to the predatory tendencies of large formal enterprises who purchase their products, repackage them, claim ownership and resell them for bigger profits. Informal innovators lack opportunities for appropriate training and most of their expertise is based on experience and on-the-job training. Due to their lack of support from financial institutions, universities and the private sector, informal businesses and innovations have experienced stunted growth, poor product quality and profit margins despite the existence of policies to promote and protect them. Appropriate incentives are needed for informal innovators, together with policy enforcement mechanisms and their integration with other institutions, such as the private sector and universities, to improve the development, adoption and the marketing of informal innovations.

The Role of a Policy in Strengthening Corporate Social Responsibility: An Empirical Study of the Mining Sector in Ghana

The prohibition imposed on resource-rich nations by the Global North governments to legislate laws to control multi-national enterprises has hit a death nail in any attempt(s) to innovate corporate social responsibility. Consequently, a self-commitment strategy was recommended for adoption to guide business own activities. This strategy undermines business participation in effective social governance yet encourages externalisation of the corporate cost of production, leading to catastrophic ramifications for host communities. The paper, therefore, proposes a policy nuance, which is a novelty in the existing literature, to oversee social responsibility undertakings and brings on board the corporate body in the social development discourse. Meanwhile, an SPSS analysis shows a statistically significant p-value and a negative coefficient which indicates comparability between policy and corporate social responsibility resulting in an endorsement of the paper’s proposition. Conclusively, a policy distinction would ensure appropriate planning, realistic and objective target setting, and compensatory plus effective and efficient implementation of basic social amenities, while systematising and normalising social agenda in corporate management strategies. It would also inspire checks of multi-national enterprises’ commitments since benchmarks are established and visible for references. Expectedly, further study on an appropriate policy enforcement mechanism for social (and environmental) governance is recommended.

The Effectiveness of Decentralisation as a Response Mechanism for Disaster Risk Management in Bamenda, North West Cameroon

Decentralized disaster risk governance has gained significant attention with the rising rate of global urban development today. Although scholarly debate/interest in this subject has grown, a comprehensive assessment of its efficiency is still rare. This paper attempts to fill this gap through a critical analysis of decentralisation as a response mechanism for disaster risk management in Bamenda in a bid to enshrine sustained solutions into concrete policy options. Using primary data (field observations, interviews, on-the-spot-appraisals) and secondary data (published/unpublished works and internet sources) sources through the descriptive and analytical methods of investigation, the findings unknots the fact that the intrinsic physical setting of Bamenda exhibited through its precarious geologic structure, undulating topography and extremely steep slopes are omni-inviting for a plethora of adverse environmental imprints. Contrary to these challenges, the urban development process in Bamenda has disregarded its natural setting as unplanned development through the anthropisation of slopes and wetlands is a common idiosyncrasy. Given this current state of affairs, however, the effectiveness of decentralization as a response mechanism for disaster risk management leaves much to be desired. This missing link is beset and partly catalyzed by deep institutional and regulatory lapses in the manifestation of decentralisation, ineffective and inconsistent management capacities, poor policy implementation and enforcement mechanisms relating to town planning instruments, bureaucracy and clientelistic practices. These speed breaks have rendered decentralisation as a response mechanism for disaster risk management largely ineffective in Bamenda. The paper suggests the need for the fortification of the capacities of workers in decentralized institutions, the need for the central government to devolve effective powers to local governments for disaster risk management, the need for greater financial autonomy and for the introduction of checks and balances to prevent the misuse of powers to achieve personal gains.

Data provenance to audit compliance with privacy policy in the Internet of Things

Managing privacy in the IoT presents a significant challenge. We make the case that information obtained by auditing the flows of data can assist in demonstrating that the systems handling personal data satisfy regulatory and user requirements. Thus, components handling personal data should be audited to demonstrate that their actions comply with all such policies and requirements. A valuable side-effect of this approach is that such an auditing process will highlight areas where technical enforcement has been incompletely or incorrectly specified. There is a clear role for technical assistance in aligning privacy policy enforcement mechanisms with data protection regulations. The first step necessary in producing technology to accomplish this alignment is to gather evidence of data flows. We describe our work producing, representing and querying audit data and discuss outstanding challenges.

Network Governance as a Mechanism for Responding to Internet Violence

ABSTRACTJones, Hesterly and Borgatti (1997) proposed a general theory of network governance (GTNG), identifying conditions under which network governance is likely to develop and detailing four social mechanisms that protect and promote resource exchange and collaborative action within a network. This article applies their theory to the emerging problem of swatting—internet-based spoofing attacks that compel a SWAT response to a selected innocent victim. As this problem has not been addressed through traditional policy or law enforcement mechanisms, networks have emerged to respond to these attacks. The author details the parallels between these emergent networks and Jones et al.’s theoretical framework.

Semiautomated Verification of Access Control Implementation in Industrial Networked Systems

Access control is a necessary building block in the security of any kind of cyber system and, in this sense, industrial networked systems (INSs) make no exception. Typically, access control policies are specified at a high implementation-independent level of abstraction and then mapped onto the real system by leveraging available policy enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, different from general-purpose ICT systems, enforcement mechanisms are generally very basic in INS. As a consequence, verifying the correctness of policy implementation becomes a crucial task, especially cumbersome when it needs to be carried out entirely by hand. This paper presents a new methodology, which also serves as the basis of a purposely developed software tool conceived to cope with the lack of policy enforcement mechanisms in INS and to allow semiautomatic verification of policy implementation. Our approach is based on a twofold system model that enables both the abstract specification of access control policies and the detailed description of the target physical system. These two separate views are then combined to automatically determine whether the current system implementation matches the policy specification.

Does Enforcement Matter? Judicialization in PTAs and Trade Flows

AbstractThis paper focuses on the variability of judicialization across preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and their impact on trade flows. We develop a categorization of PTAs that contrasts enforcement mechanisms with the level of trade policy discretion allowed by a trade agreement and the degree of flexibility allowed for members. Utilizing an original dataset of PTAs signed by countries in Asia, which has emerged as one of the most active regions of PTA formation and which exhibits wide variability in levels of judicialization, we compare the effects of trade policy discretion, flexibility provisions, and enforcement mechanisms in PTAs on trade flows. We examine the empirical strength of our theoretical framework distinguishing between discretion, flexibility, and enforcement using confirmatory factor analysis. The empirical analysis then goes on to examine their respective effects on trade flows. The results show that agreements with strong commitments, that is, those that remove more trade policy discretion from a government, lead to a greater expansion of trade between signatories. Enforcement and flexibility mechanisms, however, have mixed effects.

Query Monitoring and Analysis for Database Privacy - A Security Automata Model Approach.

Privacy and usage restriction issues are important when valuable data are exchanged or acquired by different organizations. Standard access control mechanisms either restrict or completely grant access to valuable data. On the other hand, data obfuscation limits the overall usability and may result in loss of total value. There are no standard policy enforcement mechanisms for data acquired through mutual and copyright agreements. In practice, many different types of policies can be enforced in protecting data privacy. Hence there is the need for an unified framework that encapsulates multiple suites of policies to protect the data. We present our vision of an architecture named security automata model (SAM) to enforce privacy-preserving policies and usage restrictions. SAM analyzes the input queries and their outputs to enforce various policies, liberating data owners from the burden of monitoring data access. SAM allows administrators to specify various policies and enforces them to monitor queries and control the data access. Our goal is to address the problems of data usage control and protection through privacy policies that can be defined, enforced, and integrated with the existing access control mechanisms using SAM. In this paper, we lay out the theoretical foundation of SAM, which is based on an automata named Mandatory Result Automata. We also discuss the major challenges of implementing SAM in a real-world database environment as well as ideas to meet such challenges.

A Framework for Expressing and Enforcing Purpose-Based Privacy Policies

Purpose is a key concept in privacy policies. Although some models have been proposed for enforcing purpose-based privacy policies , little has been done in defining formal semantics for purpose, and therefore an effective enforcement mechanism for such policies has remained a challenge. We have developed a framework for expressing and enforcing such policies by giving a formal definition of purpose and proposing a modal-logic language for formally expressing purpose constraints. The semantics of this language are defined over an abstract model of workflows . Based on this formal framework, we discuss some properties of purpose, show how common forms of purpose constraints can be formalized, how purpose-based constraints can be connected to more general access control policies, and how they can be enforced in a workflow-based information system by extending common access control technologies.

Changing housing policies and housing provision in Jos, Nigeria

Nigeria's housing problems have persisted regardless of changes in policy, strategies, actions and instruments. This study examines housing policy changes and factors that influence housing supply outcomes at the local level. The study reviews the state of housing provision in the national context. The focus is then turned to the city of Jos in north-central Nigeria, where institutional arrangements for the provision of housing are critically examined. Primary data was obtained through interviews with industry role players (government officers and house builders) and the views of people were sampled through a questionnaire survey. This data was then combined with secondary source material to examine financial mechanisms, subsidy provision and local-level organisational frameworks for partnership. The findings suggest that a shift from a state-led to an enabling approach for housing did stimulate the activities of private house-builders and primary mortgage institutions. However, their activities are not spread across the regions of Nigeria. The issue of equitable allocation of public housing across the regions of Nigeria by the federal agencies has not been addressed by the enabling policy framework. Further, the idea of decentralisation of housing provision was introduced but did not result in the formulation of strategies by the local authorities in Jos. The national housing policy itself appears to be ambiguous and difficult to implement by the authorities in Jos. The ambiguities arose because there is a lack of policy enforcement mechanism, political commitment, and a poor local organisation and coordination framework. These failures create uncertainties and risks for private house builders that partnered the government to access finance and subsidies for the provision of low-income housing in Jos. Also, there is limited participation of households due to lack of awareness on public policies. On the basis of the study's findings, some policy recommendations are made.